Amazon is Making Meaningful Gains in Search Ad Market

Google remains atop the search advertising world, but Amazon is growing rapidly. eMarketer forecasts that Amazon will grow 30% over last year’s search ad revenue to claim more than one eighth of the market this year at 12.9%.

Google is still the king of the category with 73% of US search ad revenue, and Amazon’s rapid growth may well hit a limit in coming years as it struggles to steal too much from the plate of the world’s number-one search engine.

But for now, Amazon appears to be posing a legitimate threat and stealing some market share from Google in a category that, like the extremely lucrative Amazon Web Services, is ancillary for Amazon but central to Google. Advertising accounted for 84% of Alphabet’s revenue last quarter. Amazon folds ad revenue into its “other” category, but that revenue stream is growing at a rapid clip.

It will be key to see if the pace of Amazon’s overall and search ad revenue slows down in the next few years as it exhausts a latent market opportunity. For now, its ad success is just one more sign, like the news that it will likely sell its Go tech to retailers, that Amazon can find and dominate new businesses beyond its core identity as the Everything Store.