Amazon‘s massive advertising business, surpassed only by Google and Meta in the US, is about to get even bigger. In addition to selling ads on its extensive marketplace, the company will now allow other retailers to use the technology behind its $50 billion business on their own websites, as Adweek previously reported.
The new beta version of the company’s Retail Ad Service will allow other online retailers to “serve contextually relevant ads using Amazon’s two decades of experience in advertising technology, driven by machine learning models trained on trillions of purchase signals” on their product, search, and browsing pages.
It also connects retailers to Amazon’s existing advertising customers, as brands that already use Amazon’s advertising system can place their ads on third-party sites. It also allows Amazon to generate more revenue from “retail media” (the ads you see in stores or while shopping online) even if purchases don’t take place on its site, and could give it access to more data – which could raise questions from the FTC.
As CNBC notes, the path of this business is similar to the launch of Amazon Web Services, which the company built to ensure that its online marketplace was fast 24/7 before selling access to servers as a basis for other companies to operate.
