Amazon’s advertising business grew by 20% in Q2 of 2024, generating £10.08bn ($12.77bn) but falling just short of its year-on-year growth forecast.
This marks a downward turn from a more successful Q1, which saw the firm beat Wall Street forecasts, with advertising services revenue increasing by 24% year-on-year.
Earlier this year had looked promising from an advertising stance for the business, as sales of advertising on Amazon Prime stayed strong despite the inclusion of an ad-free tier. Analysts had predicted the ad business would grow to £10.2bn ($13bn) in Q2 of this year.
In contrast, other digital advertising services, including Meta (which posted £30.5bn in revenue), Google, YouTube and Microsoft have all seen growth continue to improve year-on-year.
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Overall, the tech giant’s net profit increased to £10.66bn ($13.5bn), while sales increased by 10% to £116.92bn ($148bn) in the second quarter.
Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, grew by 19% from £19.78bn ($25.037bn) to £20.76bn ($26.281bn).
Amazon CEO and president Andy Jassy also highlighted a focus on Amazon web services saying that the business is “continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in Amazon Web Service Growth”.
He added that they were 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 system and AI capabilities”.