Amazon Q2 results: Advertising revenue jumped 20% to $12.7 billion

On August 1, 2024, Amazon announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2024. The company's ad revenue increased by 20% to $12.7 billion from $10.6 billion in 2023.

The advertising services include sales of advertising services to sellers, vendors, publishers, authors, and others, through programmes such as sponsored ads, display, and video advertising. Most ad sales continue to come from sponsored product listings on its online store.

Andy Jassy, Amazon's president and CEO shared that the company is continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in Amazon Web Services' (AWS) growth.

“As companies continue to modernise their infrastructure and move to the cloud, while also leveraging new Generative AI opportunities, AWS continues to be customers’ top choice as we have much broader functionality, superior security and operational performance, a larger partner ecosystem, and AI capabilities like SageMaker for model builders, Bedrock for those leveraging frontier models, Trainium for those where the cost of compute for training and inference matters, and Q for those wanting the most capable GenAI assistant for not just coding, but also software development and business integration,” he added.

Net sales increased 10% to $148.0 billion in the second quarter, compared with $134.4 billion in the second quarter of 2023.

For its third quarter, Amazon expects its net sales to be between $154.0 billion and $158.5 billion, or to grow between 8% and 11% compared with the third quarter 2023. This guidance anticipates an unfavourable impact of approximately 90 basis points from foreign exchange rates.