The tech company earnings keep coming thick and fast. But while the most recent numbers from Amazon’s growing ad business make for positive reading, the same cannot be said for Snap.
Amazon’s online ad business brought in $US12.77 billion ($AU19.6 billion) during the last quarter, up 20 per cent year-on-year. It marks the sixth straight quarter of its revenues growing by at least 20 per cent.
Of course, for Amazon, this is still very much a growing area of the business. Its AWS cloud division brought in more than twice as much as its ad business.
“We’re continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in AWS growth,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon president and CEO.
“As companies continue to modernise their infrastructure and move to the cloud, while also leveraging new Generative AI opportunities, AWS continues to be customers’ top choice as we have much broader functionality, superior security and operational performance, a larger partner ecosystem, and AI capabilities like SageMaker for model builders, Bedrock for those leveraging frontier models, Trainium for those where the cost of compute for training and inference matters, and Q for those wanting the most capable GenAI assistant for not just coding, but also software development and business integration.”
Snap, meanwhile, is reliant on advertising as its main source of sales and it’s having a much harder time.
In the last quarter, its revenue climbed by 16 per cent year-on-year to the last to $US1.2 billion ($AU1.84 billion). However, it still lost $US248 million ($AU381 million) in the quarter. This is despite its failing active users growing by 36 million — nine per cent year-on-year.
“Our community grew to reach more than 850 million monthly active users in Q2, with more than 11 million Snapchat+ subscribers,” said Evan Spiegel, CEO.
“We continued to scale our advertising platform with active advertisers more than doubling year-over-year. We are looking forward to hosting our upcoming Snap Partner Summit on September 17, where we will announce new updates to our service.”
Snap remains something of an outlier among the major tech platforms. Yesterday, B&T wrapped the results for Pinterest, Meta and Microsoft which all saw revenue growth, as well as remaining profitable.
