The most remarkable thing about Amazon’s second quarter was not the number. It was how little anyone at Amazon wanted to talk about it.
Advertising revenue grew 26% year over year, from $15.7 billion to $19.8 billion — a business now compounding at a near-$80 billion annualised run rate — and it received only a passing mention on the earnings call. The two ad items executives did surface were telling in their own way: 30 new advertisers on NBA coverage, and an Ads Agent that compresses campaign setup from hours to minutes. What leadership actually wanted to discuss was AI. Net income landed at $62.6 billion, of which $53.4 billion came from Amazon’s Anthropic stake — a paper gain large enough to make a twenty-billion-dollar ad quarter look like a footnote.
AdExchanger’s read is the one worth keeping: Big Tech is deliberately reframing itself as AI-first while the advertising business compounds quietly underneath. Alphabet ran the same playbook this quarter. The ads keep paying for everything; the story is about something else.
The numbers in this piece
01The footnote is the competition
For publisher-side operators, the temptation is to file this under platform earnings and move on. Resist it, because two details in the footnote describe your competitive environment more precisely than most dedicated coverage does.
The first is the run rate. A near-$80 billion annualised ad business is the gravitational mass sitting on the retail, endemic and increasingly non-endemic budgets that publisher sales teams pitch against. Every commerce, CPG, finance and travel conversation you have now happens in Amazon’s shadow, whether or not Amazon is in the room.
The second is the Ads Agent, and it is the operational one. Setup compressed from hours to minutes is not a convenience feature — it removes the friction that historically kept smaller and mid-market advertisers from defaulting their whole budget to Amazon. Those advertisers, the ones without agencies and without patience for insertion orders, are precisely the accounts a regional or niche publisher’s direct sales operation lives on. Amazon just made itself the easiest place for them to spend, at the exact moment the industry’s agentic-buying standards (see this issue’s AAMP 2.3 story) are making “easy for software to buy” a durable advantage rather than a gimmick.
The asymmetry to internalise: you cannot out-data Amazon, and you should stop trying to. Amazon knows what people buy. It is structurally weaker on what people care about — context, content adjacency, editorial trust, and reach beyond the transaction moment. That is the ground a publisher can actually defend, but only if the buying experience does not give the budget back.
02Why this matters for publishers
| The benchmark for buying friction just moved to "minutes." | When a smaller advertiser can stand up an Amazon campaign before lunch, a publisher process involving an IO, three emails and a spec sheet is not a premium experience — it is a reason to spend elsewhere, regardless of audience quality. |
|---|---|
| Retail media's growth is coming out of budgets you used to see | A business adding roughly $4 billion of quarterly ad revenue year over year is not conjuring that money; a meaningful share is migrating from channels — including the open web — where publishers previously competed for it. |
| The AI-first framing is strategic cover, and it works on your advertisers too | As platforms position advertising as the boring machinery beneath the AI story, ad budgets flow toward them with less scrutiny, not more. Your pitch has to interrupt a default, not win a bake-off. |
| What Amazon lacks is pitchable — if you can prove it | Context, adjacency and non-endemic reach are real differentiators, but in a market where Meta is publishing conversion-lift figures, they need measurement behind them, not adjectives. |
A $19.8 billion quarter mentioned in passing tells you exactly where advertising sits in Big Tech's story: nowhere in the narrative, everywhere in the economics.
03What publishers should do
04The bottom line
A $19.8 billion quarter mentioned in passing tells you exactly where advertising sits in Big Tech’s story: nowhere in the narrative, everywhere in the economics. Publishers should read it the same way the platforms do — as the machine that funds everything else — and notice that the machine is now being fitted with agents that make it effortless to feed. The defensible position is not better data than Amazon; it is a buying experience fast enough not to lose by default, and a contextual story strong enough to win on the ground Amazon cannot occupy.