A huge portion of it's money comes from people paying for the top search result on Amazon's retail site. Oh sure, they ad a very tiny "sponsored" but you have to scroll past three of those before you see the actual search result.
But if Amazon Retail didn't exist, Amazon Ads wouldn't either. Meanwhile, AWS could be split off as an independent company and be quite successful.
But ads only works because of Amazon retail's sorta-kinda-monopoly position. It's still a big distortion of the market. But I don't have a bright idea what to do about it.
Last time I shopped at Walmart, it was a mess and their e commerce is even worse, products come all beat up, 3rd party policies are a free for all atm, and the scams are even worse there
I agree on the third-party products/listings. I have to assume that Sam Walton is turning in is grave because it all seems like a perversion of old-school merchandising.
With that said, Walmart is beginning to push 3rd party sellers a lot online too, and filtering for items sold by Walmart can be difficult. A lot of times items show up as in stock in search results only to actually not be in stock when I finally load the product or cart pages, and Walmart will often switch these to in-store pick up automatically which is frustrating as the nearest store to me is quite far. I’ve had good luck shopping at Target but their prices are almost never as competitive.
It’s a smart move to use single digit margins in retail as a route to making double digit margins in online advertising.
E.g. Apple famously doesn't report App Store revenues. Instead it's just part of their "services" revenue which includes several other things.
Edit: guess it was FASB, not SEC
The only section in the 10K referencing FASB is above.
This is related to reporting CUSTOMER contracts, not a requirement to report Business Division revenue (like Amazons Ad Business).
The reason for this change, which again is unrelated to the original topic at hand, is that it posses a financial risk to investors if X customer represents a significant portion of the companies revenue.
> Certain advertising services are now classified as revenue rather than a reduction in cost of sales
Reading in-between the lines on this, advertising flipped from retail contra-cogs to it's own revenue segment. Advertising biz got to big to report like that.
What are some of the average metrics for the average Amazon seller doing paid advertising? Cost per impression, cost per click, cost per conversion/sale?
I wonder how they compare to Google AdWords.
Acquiring AWS would absolutely be the kind of emergency/pull out every stop to make it happen event worth tapping every connection (and then some) to make happen. Overnight they would go from scrappy second place to the dominant provider of all cloud computing on the planet.
Far more dumb mergers were greenlit in the past like AOL/Time Warner.
https://siliconangle.com/2021/12/23/report-ftc-chair-lina-kh...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/technology/lina-khan-ftc-...
In the 2020 presidential election year Microsoft donated over 21 million dollars, almost all to democrats and the Biden campaign. They were the 26th largest donor, period.
Biden appointed Lina Khan, she owes her job to him (and he can choose not to appoint her again!). Biden owes a substantial amount of his presidential campaign funding to Microsoft... not hard to connect the dots here.
Go back decades--Hillary Clinton, Obama, Gore, etc. and Microsoft was always been donating enormous amounts of money to democratic candidates.
"NOTE: Organizations themselves cannot contribute to candidates and party committees."
How about an actual threat, the Koch family (one of the infamous brothers died), who by themselves have a budget about the same size as the entire us republican party, and have taken it upon themselves to select the next republican presidential candidate - and they will back that up with enormous spending. Regardless of your views on the political parties specific choices, it's a bad idea for a private group to control (or credibly attempt to control) who can run for president - this is fundamentally different than microsoft's donations (even if I don't like that corporations are putting money into politics). Koch have had a lot of success in setting the previous few decade's political framework about how the us looked at international trade, along with influencing the libertarian party (David Koch was the Libertarian VP candidate in 1980, but had enormous impact on that movement over time).
I don't feel like you can draw conclusions like that, or you can? idk