Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

> ... last year Amazon had $38bn of ad revenue, more than any traditional media company and bigger than the entire (now much reduced) global newspaper industry.

> $38bn is a small percentage of Amazon’s overall $502bn 2022 revenue, but it probably had well over 50% operating margins, which would mean it brought in as much operating profit as AWS - $20-25bn, and without anything like as much capex.

Fascinating analysis. Ben also makes an interesting argument that Amazon uses ads as a price discrimination tool, allowing the store to extract more wealth from brands willing and able to pay for ads vs other sellers.