Amazon ad growth halves to 11% as DoorDash buys Instacart for $17bn

Amazon published its third-quarter results after the market closed on Thursday, October 29, and the advertising line was the one that stood out. Advertising services revenue rose 10.9% to $19.64 billion, from $17.70 billion a year earlier, or 12% excluding currency effects. In the second quarter the same line had grown 26%. PPC Land reported that ad revenue actually fell by $172 million from the second quarter, at a time when Amazon has been adding sports rights, agentic tools and new formats at pace.

Amazon's explanation was the calendar. Prime Day, which usually falls in July, moved into June this year for most large countries, pulling a week of heavy promotional spending into the second quarter. The company's release referred to "timing anomalies primarily related to Prime Day (and a couple other timing factors)". Taken together, the two quarters grew about 18%, by PPC Land's calculation, which is slower than the 22% Amazon recorded in the fourth quarter of 2025 but far from a collapse. The guidance for the final three months of the year was more telling. "We expect year-over-year advertising revenue to grow in the high teens in fourth quarter 2026," Amazon said, a pace below the 22% of a year earlier.

AdExchanger's Joanna Gerber reported that Andy Jassy also pointed to the absence of NBA games in the third quarter, alongside the Prime Day shift. Amazon said in July that its NBA inventory had sold out, and the 2026-27 season opened on October 23, so the fourth quarter has basketball and the third did not. Net income came in at $20.7 billion against $21.2 billion a year earlier, a comparison distorted by $9.5 billion of gains on the company's Anthropic stake in the year-ago quarter. Shares fell about 7% in after-hours trading.

The rest of the business was not short of momentum. Net sales rose 12% to $201.94 billion. Amazon Web Services grew 39.3% to $45.98 billion, and operating income reached $28.1 billion, a record margin of 13.9%. The cost of that cloud growth sits on the cash flow statement. Purchases of property and equipment reached $77.26 billion in the quarter alone, and trailing twelve-month free cash flow turned into an outflow of $42.36 billion. Amazon had already told investors it expects to spend about $220 billion on capital projects in 2026, up from an earlier figure of about $200 billion.

Adweek put Amazon's trailing twelve-month ad revenue at $78 billion and focused on a question that has hung over retail media since chatbots began to shop: whether AI agents that browse and buy on behalf of consumers are draining the sponsored product business. Amazon says external AI agents are not hurting its ad business, and Jassy's description of the market was blunt. "Few customers are doing much shopping this way yet," he said. Adweek also noted that Thursday Night Football, in its fifth season on Prime Video, averaged 17.7 million viewers, up 17%.

Amazon's sports ambitions extend into the broadcast itself. On October 28 the company published a technical account of Prime 360, an AI system that generates highlight replays in select NBA on Prime broadcasts. Running the system's diffusion models on Amazon's own Trainium chips cuts processing latency by more than 40%, the company wrote, without stating the baseline. Each frame is cut into "dozens of overlapping tiles" processed independently. Unlike earlier AI features that pick or summarise existing footage, Prime 360 renders new frames. Amazon has not said whether the segments carry sponsorship, nor how many seconds separate a play from its generated replay. "With Prime 360, that investment is showing up in something millions of fans will see on screen," the company wrote.

Alexa is also moving into a new market. Amazon began rolling out Alexa+ in Japan on October 29 through a free Early Access programme. Once that ends, non-Prime customers will pay ¥3,000 a month, five times the ¥600 monthly Prime fee, while Prime members get the assistant at no extra cost. Over a year, the ¥36,000 price is about 6.1 times the annual Prime fee of ¥5,900. Japan is the 13th country on Amazon's list, and the company says Alexa+ will reach more than 10 more countries in 2027. "Over the last three years, Japanese customers have interacted with Alexa nearly 30 billion times," Amazon said. Restaurant bookings through Tabelog and deliveries through Uber Eats and Demae-can are planned but not yet live, and Alexa+ ad formats remain limited to the United States.

Reddit closes the door on logged-out readers

Reddit reported its third quarter the same evening, and the numbers would have been the story on almost any other day. Advertising revenue rose 54% to $847 million, and total revenue rose 53% to $894.96 million, above the $860 million to $870 million the company had guided. Net income rose 74% to $283.3 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose 70% to $402.3 million, a margin of 44.9%. Max campaigns reached general availability, and video ad revenue more than doubled, although Reddit gave no dollar figure.

The shareholder letter carried a warning beneath the growth. "Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter," it said. In October, referrals from search engines fell by more than 1 million a week on average. If the decline continues, Reddit said, daily active uniques "could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage" from 130 million. In the United States, daily uniques fell to 50.7 million, yet US revenue rose 50% to $718.9 million and revenue per US unique rose 53% to $13.82. Fewer visitors are paying more. "Web search is evolving from a gateway to the web to becoming an AI-powered destination itself," Steve Huffman, the chief executive, wrote in the letter. Fourth-quarter guidance calls for revenue of $1.00 billion to $1.03 billion.

Hours before the call, Huffman posted a note on his personal profile titled "About that login screen". It announced that, after two decades of open browsing, Reddit will make logins the norm. "We're going to evolve Reddit to being a primarily logged-in experience," he wrote. The post listed four reasons: personalisation, the advertising business, safety regulation and protection of Reddit's data. "The first is that access to Reddit's data corpus has to be intentional," Huffman wrote. Logging in will not require a name or identity, and the front page, shared posts and visitors arriving from search will stay viewable. The first tests will run in select markets outside the US in the coming months, with no countries or dates named. The scale of the change is considerable: in the second quarter, logged-out visitors made up 77.7 million of Reddit's 130.3 million daily uniques.

AdExchanger's Anthony Vargas framed the decision in a single word: blame Google. Logged-in and app users generate more than 80% of Reddit's monetisation, and the company's average revenue per user reached $6.87. With search referrals shrinking, converting the remaining visitors into account holders is the more reliable route to revenue. Huffman did not hedge about where the traffic went. "The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not for anybody, as far as I know," he said on the call. The move follows a string of earlier closures, including the end of unauthenticated .json endpoints, the Old Reddit login change, the end of RSS feeds on November 13 and the planned closing of public Data API access in March 2027.

DoorDash pays $17bn for Instacart's grocery ads

The largest deal of the day came from delivery. DoorDash agreed on October 29 to buy Instacart for $65.00 a share, an equity value of about $17 billion and a 26% premium to Instacart's closing price on October 22. At least 75% of the consideration will be paid in cash. Instacart holders can choose $65.00 in cash, 0.3372 DoorDash shares, or a mix of $48.75 in cash and 0.0843 shares, subject to proration. Instacart's board approved the deal unanimously, and holders of about 19% of its shares agreed to vote in favour.

The closing date is unusually distant. The companies expect to complete the transaction at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028, after antitrust reviews in the United States, Canada and Israel. The merger agreement, filed with the SEC, sets a $650 million termination fee payable by Instacart and a $1.25 billion antitrust fee payable by DoorDash if regulators block the deal. A 364-day bridge facility of up to $13.0 billion from JPMorgan Chase would fund the cash portion. "Grocery is one of the hardest things to get right online," said Tony Xu, DoorDash's co-founder and chief executive. Chris Rogers, Instacart's chief executive, said: "Over the last 14 years, Instacart has transformed online grocery by helping retailers of all sizes compete and grow."

Adweek reported that the deal values Instacart at about $17 billion and that Instacart's Caper Carts smart trolley business is being wound down. For advertisers, the significance lies in combining two grocery ad sellers. James Hercher of AdExchanger described the acquisition as consolidation coming for mobility media, noting that DoorDash passed $1 billion in ad revenue in 2024 and that Instacart now books more than $300 million a quarter.

Instacart's own results, released the same day, showed what DoorDash is buying. Advertising and other revenue rose 23% to $331 million in the third quarter, while transaction revenue rose 14% to $764 million. Total revenue rose 17% to $1.095 billion on gross transaction value of $10.53 billion, up 15%, across 91.4 million orders. By PPC Land's arithmetic, advertising and other revenue rose 12% per order to $3.62. "Q3 was our best quarter as a public company, with GTV up 15% year-over-year," Rogers said. Instacart cancelled its November 5 earnings call, suspended guidance and withdrew its long-term targets. The merger agreement bars share buybacks without DoorDash's consent, and it requires DoorDash's approval for new exclusivity deals, most-favoured-nation clauses and certain contracts granting AI companies access to data. Instacart had spent $921 million on repurchases in the first nine months of the year.

DoorDash reported a record quarter alongside the announcement. Net income attributable to common stockholders rose 91% to $466 million, or $1.06 a diluted share. Revenue rose 34% to $4.62 billion, or 23% excluding Deliveroo, the British delivery company it acquired. Total orders reached 993 million, up 28%, and marketplace gross order value rose 36% to $33.9 billion. The release gave no advertising revenue figure, though sales and marketing expense rose 33% to $765 million. "Grocery delivery is still early in its adoption," the company said.

Payment networks, telecoms and audio report

The day's other earnings filings carried a common thread: companies with advertising businesses that do not break them out. PayPal's Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC on October 27, disclosed that the Federal Trade Commission sent a civil investigative demand in September asking whether PayPal engaged in deceptive or unfair practices in the advertising and marketing of fees and purchase protection. It is the third such demand PayPal lists, after one in February 2022 and another in August 2025. The filing names no product, fee or period, and it never mentions PayPal Ads, the advertising unit the company has built since 2024. Net revenues rose 2% to $8.58 billion, and revenue from PayPal products fell about $240 million, partly because of co-marketing incentives with large merchants recorded as reductions to revenue. "We have reduced headcount by more than 2,000 and removed three organizational layers across most areas of the company," Enrique Lores, the chief executive, said on the earnings call.

TransUnion went the other way on marketing spend. Its third-quarter 10-Q showed advertising costs about $11.0 million lower in the first nine months of 2026, as the company ran fewer promotional campaigns for Consumer Interactive, its direct-to-consumer credit report business. That unit's revenue fell 3.0% to $140.3 million. Emerging Verticals, the US client group that includes marketing solutions, grew 6.3% to $351.0 million, but TransUnion gives no separate figure for its marketing products. Its legal and regulatory accrual rose to $96.4 million from $62.2 million. On one regulatory matter, the filing was candid: "Given changes in CFPB leadership, our engagement with the agency on this matter has paused."

Mastercard's figures were larger. Net revenue rose 14% to $9.81 billion, and value-added services and solutions grew 19% to $4.06 billion, now 41.4% of the total. Rebates and incentives paid to customers rose 18% to $6.37 billion, more than the $5.75 billion of payment network revenue Mastercard kept. Cross-border card-not-present spending outside travel grew 15%, down from 20% in the second quarter. The filings contain no revenue figure for Mastercard Commerce Media or agentic commerce. "We're not waiting for the future of commerce," said Michael Miebach, the chief executive.

T-Mobile US, which published results on October 28, spent more on its own advertising. Advertising expense rose 5.5% to $956 million from $906 million, while total revenue rose 7% to $23.58 billion and net income rose 27% to $3.46 billion. T-Mobile owns Vistar Media and Blis, bought for about $801 million in cash in early 2025, yet neither the release nor the 10-Q gives a revenue figure for either. Asked about AI shopping agents, Jonathan Freier, the chief operating officer, said: "We haven't really seen anything to date."

Audio advertising showed its limits at SiriusXM. Advertising revenue was $456 million against $455 million a year earlier. Podcast advertising grew 20%, down from 30% in the second quarter and nearly 50% a year earlier, and programmatic advertising grew 21%, while streaming music advertising declined. Pandora's monthly active users fell 7% to 38.8 million, and ad-supported listener hours fell 10%. SiriusXM nonetheless raised its 2026 targets by $25 million each, to about $8.55 billion of revenue. "We're stabilizing our subscriber base, deepening engagement through differentiated content and experiences," said Jennifer Witz, the chief executive.

Google blends ads and shopping into AI answers

Google's experiments with commerce inside AI Mode continued in public view. Search Engine Roundtable reported that AI Mode is blending "All products" results with sponsored products, a format spotted by Sachin Patel via Search Engine Watch. A Google spokesperson confirmed it: "Yes, this format is part of our ongoing experiments with ads in AI Mode." The test arrives a day after Alphabet's chief business officer told investors that AI Mode carries fewer ads than a conventional results page.

AI Overviews are also becoming a funnel into AI Mode. Gagan Ghotra spotted query refinement bubbles beneath AI Overviews that open AI Mode when tapped. "Clicking any bubble takes user to AI Mode and text of that bubble becomes the prompt," Ghotra wrote. The design converts a classic search result into an entry point for a conversational session, where ad inventory is still being built.

Merchants received the plumbing for agentic shopping. Google's October Merchant API updates added YouTube Shopping affiliate reporting, performance reporting for the Universal Commerce Protocol in v1alpha, new video and warranty attributes, and the deprecation of the YoutubeProductPerformanceView report. Google's own release notes for October 2026 list the changes in full. Reporting on agentic performance is the notable addition, because it gives merchants their first official view of sales that originate when an AI system, rather than a person, completes a checkout.

Local businesses are getting AI of their own. Google is expanding AI-powered messaging for Google Business Profiles, a feature that Claudia Tomina and Mike Blumenthal spotted and that works only over RCS. Google says the assistant "will answer routine questions from customers, instantly and at no cost." Businesses that rely on the message button for leads will now find an automated agent handling the first exchange.

Spam, links and the data Google keeps

Google's John Mueller offered a long view of AI-generated spam. In an interview with David Iwanow, he said Google's systems will eventually catch AI spam, as they have caught earlier tricks. "People always find some trick and then they write about it and then everyone goes off and does that," Mueller said, adding: "None of this is new." The comment fits a pattern in Google's public statements, which treat generative spam as a scale problem for existing systems rather than a new category.

Mueller also addressed a recurring worry among site owners. In a Reddit thread on r/TechSEO, he said Search Console does not show all spammy links pointing at a site, and that their absence from reports is not a signal. "If these are random spammy links on the web, I'd just ignore them," he wrote.

A more consequential argument about Google's data came from Brussels. Aurélien Mähl, lead public policy manager at DuckDuckGo, said in a podcast interview published October 13 that the European Commission's order forcing Google to share search data under the Digital Markets Act will succeed or fail on enforcement, and that Google faces no external audit of the filters and costs it reports. Recipients, by contrast, face "pretty stringent auditing requirements". "And the devil is in the enforcement," Mähl said. The Commission adopted its decision on July 16 under Article 6(11). Google is due to finalise the dataset in November, and pricing and the start of sharing are due in January 2027. Mähl cited a 2024 Google dataset whose anonymisation filters removed more than 99% of distinct queries. "The anonymization filters that Google applied removed any query that is not very common," he said. DuckDuckGo, a likely recipient of the data, is not a neutral observer, and Google has argued that wider sharing risks re-identifying users.

Paris courts and regulators take on Meta and Fnac

Meta lost in the Paris Court of Appeal on October 29. The court dismissed its two appeals against interim measures imposed in July by France's competition authority, and Meta must now share revenue data with French press groups. The measures require it to negotiate in good faith over neighbouring rights remuneration "across all of its services", to give publishers information on revenue and content use, and not to degrade how press content is displayed. The court said "the transparency conditions required to determine a fair price did not appear to be met", and that the conduct was "the cause of serious and immediate harm to the press sector". Meta's agreements with the two complainants, APIG and DVP, expired at the turn of 2025, and their members have received nothing since. APIG represents more than 300 newspapers, and DVP represents 920 publications. The rulings are interim. Meta said it was disappointed and would keep complying.

The CNIL, France's data protection authority, published a decision the same day that tightens the consent rules for apps. It fined two Fnac companies a combined €7 million after inspectors found that the Fnac app kept sending a user identifier and the products viewed to a third-party domain after users clicked "Continue without accepting." The companies argued that personalisation, product recommendations and algorithm training were strictly necessary. The CNIL's restricted committee treated all three as commercial targeting that needs consent, and held that a tracker serving several purposes needs consent if any one of them does. The companies have one month from notification to prove compliance, or pay €10,000 a day. The case began with a noyb complaint in September 2023. The committee wrote that "the alleged violation is not new, even though the operations in question are carried out within a mobile application."

Screens, streams and billboards

Netflix said on October 26 that it will add themed Clips categories for its phone app in 2027, grouping short vertical clips around genres, moods or interests. "Many members watch mostly or only on a phone," the company wrote. The same post introduced a version of the app for Apple's foldable iPhone Duo. Netflix gave no figures for Clips users or advertising, but it has said vertical video ad inventory will be available globally in 2027, and on October 20 it cut its 2026 ad revenue expectation to about $2.7 billion from roughly $3 billion.

Out-of-home inventory continued to move into programmatic pipes. VIOOH, the supply-side platform created by JCDecaux, said on October 29 that more than 460 Adams Outdoor digital billboards will become available for automated buying across a 14-state network that VIOOH says generates 4.9 billion monthly impressions. Markets include Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Detroit-Ann Arbor and Pittsburgh. Neither company disclosed terms or how impressions are counted. "For media buyers, it means faster, more flexible access to some of the country's most established regional markets," said Gavin Wilson, VIOOH's global chief commercial officer.

In Singapore, a much smaller screen network is heading for Nasdaq. Focus Media Network, which runs more than 800 digital screens in office lobbies and commercial buildings, filed a Form F-1 on October 28 to sell 5 million shares at $4 to $6 each under the ticker FMSN. Revenue rose 104.4% to S$4.63 million in the year to March 31, and net income reached S$2.93 million against a prior-year loss. The prospectus credits the gain to "the successful transition to pDOOH business", with Perion and Vistar named as supply partners. The founder, Audrey Chee Hui Ling, would keep 56.25% of the voting power.

Connected television measurement got another machine-learning layer. Tatari launched Tatari Max, which brings ad-server optimisation to CTV ad matching using an "affinity score" built on its Upstream product. In a Hulu test for the apparel brand Rhoback, purchases rose 32% and site visits 10%.

Walmart Connect, meanwhile, opened its shopper data to television buyers. Months after buying the streaming ad platform Vibe, Walmart is offering more than 3,300 shopper segments on self-serve CTV, with no contract required. Ryan Mayward of Walmart Connect presented the move as a way to bring retail data to smaller advertisers on streaming.

Amazon's studio arm also set a date for its next Bosch series, on a service without ads. MGM+ will premiere the eight-episode prequel Bosch: Start of Watch on January 10, 2027, with Cameron Monaghan as a 26-year-old Harry Bosch in 1992 Los Angeles. MGM+ costs $7.99 a month in the United States and carries no ad breaks, while earlier Bosch seasons on Prime Video run ads by default.

Devices, AI spending and analytics

Apple introduced its first touchscreen Mac on October 28, a MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED display it calls PROLED XDR. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899, which means the touchscreen costs $400 more than the mini-LED MacBook Pro with the same M5 Pro chip. Contrast reaches 10,000,000:1, ten times the mini-LED panel, and peak brightness is up to 2,000 nits. "PROLED XDR is the world's best laptop display," said Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer. Deliveries begin November 6. Apple's materials do not explain how touch input reaches websites in Safari, which matters to anyone who builds ads or pages for the browser.

The money behind AI kept attracting scrutiny. Alex Altmann, global head of equities tactical strategies at Barclays, said on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast that AI will supply about 75% of S&P 500 earnings growth next year, with semiconductors alone providing about two-thirds. He said investors are in a "denial phase" about financing strains at neoclouds, the specialist compute providers that often generate little operating cash. "We're not stopping this train. That's still the consensus like to be very clear," Altmann said. Of debt issuance this year, he said: "2026 is completely shattered."

Measuring visibility inside AI assistants became harder. Semrush told customers on October 28 that it will stop tracking Microsoft Copilot on November 9 in its Enterprise AIO product, citing changes to Copilot's access requirements that block data collection. Microsoft's terms now require a Microsoft account and bar bots and scrapers. Glenn Gabe, the search consultant who shared the notice, summed it up: "AI visibility tools are facing their own version of tracking issues." Similarweb put Copilot at 2.0% of worldwide generative AI website traffic in May.

Teads released a new version of Teads Ad Manager on October 29, with Model Context Protocol connections to Claude, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot in closed beta. It claims its Control Hub copilot cuts troubleshooting time from 15 minutes to under 60 seconds, citing an unpublished alpha test with no sample size. The launch comes after a weak second quarter, in which revenue fell 17% to $284.6 million. "Marketing teams and agencies can no longer afford to manage brand and performance in isolated silos," said Remi Cackel, the chief product officer. Teads reports third-quarter results on November 5.

Brands, campaigns and publishers

With the midterms days away, Adweek's Robert Klara catalogued the four dirtiest political ads of the 2026 cycle, opening with the Willie Horton spot from 1988 as the benchmark. Among the current entries is Senator Roger Marshall's ad against Adam Hamilton. "Candidates locked in tight races have shown just how low they're prepared to go to demonize their opponents," Klara wrote.

Celebrity endorsements are proving short-lived. Rebecca Stewart of Adweek reported that the Sydney Sweeney effect can fade fast for brands, with data showing American Eagle's boost faded and Dr. Squatch recorded no lasting lift. The piece also looked at the betting app Novig and its "Just Sports" campaign.

Beauty marketing has adopted the vocabulary of dermatology. Andrea Michelson of Adweek examined how K-beauty made skincare the language of beauty marketing, with ingredients such as bakuchiol and retailers such as Sephora and Olive Young driving the shift. "Marketing has rephrased its lexicon around skincare benefits," said Claire Kane of VML.

Walmart took its membership programme south. Walmart+ launched in Mexico at half the US price, offering free shipping on orders above 399 pesos, about $22, along with the Universal+ streaming service and 2GB of mobile data from Bait, Walmart's own carrier.

Salesforce's chief marketing officer, Erin Oles, told Adweek's Jenny Rooney for its Marketing Vanguard series that all 30 chief marketing officers Salesforce spoke with had owned properties working against them in large language models. She said an SEO agent found 10,000 broken links, about 5,000 hours of human work, and described an approach she calls "surround marketing".

Publishing lost more jobs. People Inc, formerly Dotdash Meredith, laid off 195 employees, about 6% of its staff, mostly in print and legacy web operations. The memo came from Neil Vogel, the chief executive.

What comes next

The calendar for the coming months is crowded. Teads reports on November 5, and Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro reaches buyers on November 6. Semrush ends Copilot tracking on November 9, and Reddit's RSS feeds stop on November 13. Google is due to finalise its EU search dataset in November, with sharing set to begin in January 2027, the month the Bosch prequel opens on MGM+. Alexa+ and Netflix's themed Clips feeds both expand in 2027, and DoorDash's purchase of Instacart is not expected to close until the end of 2027 at the earliest. Amazon's high-teens guidance will be tested over the holiday quarter, when retail media spending typically peaks and when the company will learn whether the third quarter was a scheduling quirk or the first sign of a slower business.