Amazon’s advertising businesses earned a total of $19.8 billion in Q2, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Thursday. That’s up from $15.7 billion in Q2 2025 and good for a 26% year-over-year growth rate.
While those revenue numbers would be reason to celebrate for any other advertising business, they barely registered for Amazon. It feels like Amazon’s ad revenue growth has happened meteorically in the past decade or so, but consider that AWS’ AI product solutions alone earned $25 billion in Q3 and are still growing at a triple-digit percentage.
Like other Big Tech giants, Amazon’s earnings report has grown beyond ads as a topic in and of themselves. Aside from citing the ad revenue growth in the opening prepared remarks, advertising hardly came up, and only ever as an example of Amazon or AWS’ prowess in AI.
Another reason Amazon’s earnings particularly resembled Alphabet’s last week was that they each shared an eyebrow-raising jump in net income with similar root causes. For Amazon, net income grew from $18.2 billion in Q2 2025 to $62.6 billion in the past quarter. Of that $62.6 billion, however, $53.4 billion consisted of “non-operating pre-tax other income” related to Amazon’s ownership stake in Anthropic.
Alphabet’s profit jumped from $28.2 billion in Q2 last year to $112 billion during the same period this year. The jump was thanks to its early $900 million investment in SpaceX bearing fruit in its recent IPO.
But the most important similarity across the earnings reports of the world’s biggest ad platforms could be framed as a question: “Don’t you remember you do ads?”
Amazon does have an excuse. It doesn’t just do ads. Which is also how Amazon could add $250 billion in market cap overnight after its optimistic earnings. That’s many times more than the combined market cap of every third-party programmatic company across any major stock exchange.
But the only occasion when Amazon’s leadership cited any of its media properties or any advertising wins that weren’t expressions of AI tech was in the opening remarks. CEO Andy Jassy noted that Amazon had introduced 30 new advertisers to the NBA in its first year carrying games and have sold out streaming ad sponsorships for other sports leagues.
Ads were cited as an example of the conversion rate of Amazon’s agentic shopping products (48% more likely to convert on traffic via Sponsored Prompts). The Ads Agent product was mentioned as a prime example (pardon) of AI time benefits, since it ostensibly reduces ad campaign setup from an hours-long task to mere minutes.
Not long after Jassy became CEO about five years ago, his first earnings calls at the helm featured fun ad tech benchmark moments, such as “Amazon’s CEO awkwardly using the words ‘programmatic’ or ‘DSP’ for the first time,” like hearing Senators talk about header bidding.
Those quarterly reports seem far, far away.
Nowadays, the biggest ad platform flex from the biggest ad companies is to pretend one hardly has an ad business at all.
