If Amazon’s ad revenue isn’t being perceived as “intimidating” by its competitors in the mobile ad space, these rivals could be on the verge of making a catastrophic blunder.
“Amazon nearly doubled its ad revenue from 2011 to 2012, making a total of $610 million this past year,” says Ingrid Sjostrand of Mogul Media.
While most of their sales are built online, the company is working to grow its advertiser base, Sjostrand explains, citing eMarketer data in a new report published Monday on DDM.
The research firm predicts that Amazon’s ads will grow 35 percent this year, totaling to $835 million.
“The company uses its own ad network, the sites they own and from search results on their pages,” Sjostrand adds. “But their secret weapon might be the 209 million consumers who shop on Amazon’s sites. This allows them to provide shopping data to advertisers, which means they have what it takes to compete with Google and Facebook, two of the biggest names in ad revenue.”
As of June 2013, the overwhelming majority of Amazon’s ad revenue comes from the United States, but that could change markedly by 2015.
“eMarketer research shows that 64 percent of sales are now in the U.S. but will drop to 25.3 percent after the international shift,” Sjostrand concludes. “The U.S. could be adding $1.1 billion to Amazon’s ad revenue by 2015.”