The Amazon Selling Machine | The Atlantic

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"On Thursday, Amazon reported that the category of its business devoted to advertising and “sales related to our other service offerings” made nearly $2.5 billion in net sales in just the third quarter of 2018. In the third quarter of 2017, it made less than half that, $1.12 billion. A September report from eMarketer estimated that Amazon is now the number three digital-ad seller in the country, behind Facebook and Google. Brands will spend $4.61 billion advertising on the Amazon platform this year, the report estimated. Mike Olson, an analyst with PiperJaffray, anticipates that Amazon advertising revenue will reach $8 billion this year, a number that will double to $16 billion by 2020, and that will soon overtake in profitability Amazon’s big moneymaker, Amazon Web Services, which sells cloud-computing services.
Amazon is catnip to advertisers for the simple reason that it is already an integral part of the way we buy. About half of online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon. But the company also owns Whole Foods, Twitch, Zappos, Audible, and IMDb, and sells TVs, tablets, Kindles, Echos—what Helen Lin, the chief digital officer at Publicis Media, calls “this whole canvas of properties that allow brands to go broader.”"

The Amazon Selling Machine | The Atlantic