When discussing web advertising, Google and Facebook come to mind easily. But given new estimates, Amazon may be rising to join their ranks.
According to a report released today by eMarketer, Amazon earned almost $610 million last year in ad revenue, and that number is expected to keep rising over time. The report projects that Amazon’s global ad revenue will be more than $835 million this year, with U.S. ad revenues expected to top $1 billion in 2015.
That still puts it well behind Google, which reported $43.6 billion in ad revenue last year, but it means that Amazon is pulling in more ad revenue than Twitter.
Amazon also has access to far more data surrounding purchasing habits of its customers, something other advertisers lack, which may give it a significant edge in the event it decides to expand its advertising business.
eMarketer said it expects strong and consistent growth in Amazon’s ad revenues in the coming years. “Key to further growth will be the plethora of consumer purchasing data Amazon gathers through its core business, retail sales,” the firm wrote. “Ad-selling competitors such as Google and Facebook lack such data—and therefore its targeting potential.”
It’s hard to get a firm handle on how much Amazon’s ad business contributes to the bottom line, because it gets lumped in the “Other” category of revenues in its public reporting. That same category also contains earnings from Amazon Web Services, which are estimated to be significantly larger than Amazon’s ad business. In fact, a recent report from Morgan Stanley projected that Amazon Web Services could grow to have $24 billion in revenue by 2022.
