Amazon reported advertising services revenue of $19.8 billion for the second quarter of 2026 on July 30, 2026, a 26% increase over the same period last year and the strongest rate in the six quarters covered by the company's supplemental disclosures. The figure landed inside a quarter in which live sports inventory sold out across four properties, ads inside conversational shopping surfaces produced their first disclosed conversion numbers, and a Prime Day timing shift moved the event into the comparison base.

Growth breaks out of the low twenties

Advertising services generated $19.8 billion between April and June, compared with $15.7 billion in the second quarter of 2025, according to the earnings release Amazon published on July 30, 2026. The segment added $4.1 billion in year-over-year revenue, more than any other reported line of the business except AWS. Excluding foreign exchange effects, growth reached 26%, up from 22% in each of the previous four quarters, according to the company's supplemental financial data.

The acceleration extends a pattern that has been building since early 2025. Advertising revenue reached $17.2 billion at 24% growth in the first quarter of 2026, after $15.7 billion at 22% in the second quarter of 2025. Summing the four most recent quarters in the supplemental data puts the business at $76.1 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis.

"Moving on to Amazon Ads, we saw strong growth across our offerings, generating $19.8 billion of revenue, up 26% year-over-year. Sponsored Products continues to be our largest offering and a key driver of growth," said Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon, during the earnings call, according to the transcript published by Investing.com.

Sponsored Products, the format Jassy singled out, sits inside a line that Amazon defines as sales of advertising services to sellers, vendors, publishers, authors, and others through programs such as sponsored ads, display, and video advertising, according to the release. Advertising accounted for just under 10% of the company's $200.6 billion in total net sales. The company does not report advertising as a standalone operating segment; the revenue sits within the North America and International segments and carries no separate profit disclosure.

The call included performance figures for formats running inside Amazon's conversational commerce surfaces, a category the company has been monetizing for barely four months. "Additionally, increasingly more shoppers are discovering products in our agentic and conversational experiences, including in Alexa+ and Alexa for Shopping. Shoppers who click a sponsored prompt convert to a sale 48% more often and spend 21% more on average than those who don't," Jassy said, according to the transcript.

The disclosure carries weight because the format only recently started costing money. Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts entered a free open beta at the unBoxed conference on November 11, 2025, and became billable under cost-per-click bidding on March 25, 2026. The 48% conversion lift and 21% higher average spending represent the first performance readout Amazon has offered since advertisers began paying for the placements.

The surface carrying those prompts consolidated during the period. Amazon merged Rufus and Alexa+ into Alexa for Shopping on May 13, 2026, creating a single assistant across the Shopping app, the website, and Echo Show devices. More than 350 million customers used the assistant over the last twelve months, Jassy said on the call, with active users close to doubling and interactions up more than fivefold year-over-year. The assistant reached Germany, Austria, France, and Brazil through the Alexa+ expansion announced alongside the results, according to the company.

Amazon attached commerce metrics to the assistant as well. Customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend an average of over 40% more per order than those who do not, and customers who have tried Alexa+ sign up for Prime at a nearly 25% higher rate, according to the release. Independent research gives those figures a sharper edge for advertisers: Workflow Labs found the assistant compresses product discovery from roughly 50 search results to approximately five named products per conversational response, which raises the commercial value of every placement the system surfaces.

Live sports inventory sells out across four properties

Streaming supplied the quarter's clearest demand signal. "We introduced more than 30 new advertisers to the NBA in our first year, and inventory on Thursday Night Football, NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR all sold out," Jassy said, according to the transcript. Brands activating across multiple sports achieved 2.3 times higher unduplicated reach than single-sport buyers, he added, while multi-sport viewers drove 12% higher spend and 17% more orders on Amazon.

The sellout arrives during Prime Video's first full basketball season under the 11-year rights agreement with the NBA and WNBA signed in July 2024. Alan Moss, Amazon's vice president of global advertising sales, had disclosed the 30-advertiser figure in May, describing live sports, streaming, and retail media as a single offering heading into the 2026 upfront season. The audience behind that inventory stood at 315 million average ad-supported viewers globally as of the fourth-quarter 2025 disclosure.

Viewership data from the release explains the demand. The inaugural NBA season peaked at 6.5 million United States viewers for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, outperforming the equivalent broadcast game in 2025, and European NBA viewership more than doubled year-over-year, according to Amazon. NASCAR's second season on the service averaged 2.3 million viewers and attracted the youngest audience among the sport's broadcasters since 2017 across the past two years. Outside sports, the series premiere of Off Campus drew 36 million viewers globally in its first 12 days, the third-largest series debut in Prime Video's history, according to the release.

Ads Agent reaches 11 new countries with cost data attached

Automation received its own quantified update. "Finally, we make it easy to create, launch, and optimize full-funnel campaigns using AI-powered tools, including Ads Agent, which turns hours of setup and targeting into minutes. Advertisers using Ads Agent targeting see 8% lower cost per impression and 6% lower cost per acquisition, and we've expanded it to 11 new countries this year," Jassy said, according to the transcript.

Ads Agent debuted at the unBoxed conference on November 11, 2025, processing natural language instructions to build campaign structures, recommend audience segments, and construct analytics queries across Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP. Regional availability spanned 36 countries across six continents at launch, which makes the 11 additional markets in 2026 a meaningful widening of the tool's footprint rather than an initial rollout. The cost-per-impression and cost-per-acquisition deltas match the figures Amazon printed in its written release, marking the second consecutive quarter in which the company has attached efficiency claims to its campaign automation.

Prime Day moves into the comparison base

How much of the acceleration belongs to the calendar? Prime Day ran inside the second quarter this year for most large countries, while the 2025 edition fell entirely in the third quarter. "First, Prime Day timing shifted this year with the sales event occurring in Q2 for most of our large countries, including the U.S. In 2025, Prime Day was entirely in Q3," said Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer of Amazon, according to the transcript, explaining the sequential deceleration built into third-quarter guidance.

Amazon did not quantify the event's specific contribution to advertising revenue. The company guided third-quarter net sales to between $197.0 billion and $202.0 billion, growth of 9% to 12%, and stated that excluding Prime Day from both years the growth rate would have been nearly 400 basis points higher. The guidance anticipates an unfavorable foreign exchange impact of approximately 80 basis points. Operating income is expected between $22.5 billion and $26.5 billion, against $17.4 billion in the third quarter of 2025, according to the release.

Third-party measurement complicates a simple timing story. CommerceIQ found United States Prime Day advertising spending fell 8.8% during the June 23-26 event, even as conversion rates jumped 17.1%. Brands spent less on the event itself while converting more efficiently; the calendar change relocated that activity into the June quarter and lifted the year-over-year comparison, since the 2025 base quarter contained no Prime Day at all.

A $200.6 billion quarter around the ad business

Total net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, and operating income climbed 43% to $27.5 billion, according to the release. Olsavsky flagged approximately $1.2 billion of items inside that operating figure: roughly $600 million in tariff-related refunds recorded in the North America segment, and roughly $600 million from the fair value remeasurement of energy contracts subject to derivative accounting, primarily affecting AWS.

AWS grew 36.7% to $42.2 billion, its fastest rate in 18 quarters, reaching a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate with a backlog of $496 billion, according to the company. Net income reached $62.6 billion, or $5.75 per diluted share, a figure lifted by $53.4 billion of non-operating pre-tax other income primarily from the company's investments in Anthropic. Third-party seller services, the commission and fulfillment line tied to marketplace sellers, grew 16% to $46.8 billion, while worldwide paid units rose 17%. Both indicators describe the transaction volume running underneath the retail media auction.

The spending side moved faster than the revenue side. Cash capital expenditures reached $53.1 billion in the quarter, primarily for AWS and generative AI, and the full-year 2026 forecast rose to approximately $220 billion from a prior estimate of about $200 billion, with Jassy citing the higher cost of memory, according to the transcript. Free cash flow for the trailing twelve months swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion from an inflow of $18.2 billion a year earlier, according to the release. Shares rose 9.15% in after-hours trading to $257.04 following the announcement, according to Investing.com.

What the numbers signal for the marketing community

Three comparisons frame the quarter for advertisers. The first is relative growth. Amazon's 26% stands against the 14% advertising growth Alphabet reported for the same quarter on July 22, 2026, when Google's advertising business reached $81.6 billion. Amazon operates from roughly a quarter of Alphabet's advertising base and is compounding at nearly twice the rate, a gap that keeps shifting share-of-wallet conversations inside media plans.

The second concerns conversational surfaces. The 48% conversion lift and 21% spending premium arrive four months after prompts became billable, giving buyers the first vendor-disclosed benchmark for placements inside AI shopping assistants. Those numbers come from the seller of the inventory rather than an independent measurement source, and they land in an environment where discovery has narrowed sharply, so their interpretation will vary by category. What they establish beyond dispute is that Amazon now considers the format mature enough to defend with data on an earnings call.

The third is scarcity. Sold-out inventory across Thursday Night Football, NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR during a first full basketball season describes demand outrunning supply in Amazon's premium video business, a condition that historically precedes pricing power in upfront negotiations. The retail media engine and the streaming engine grew in the same quarter, funded by the same advertiser base, and reported through the same $19.8 billion line. Whether the 26% pace survives a quarter without Prime Day in it becomes measurable when Amazon reports third-quarter results, against a 2025 base quarter that contained the event.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon.com, Inc., with chief executive officer Andy Jassy and chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky presenting results affecting advertisers, agencies, marketplace sellers, and streaming media buyers.

What: Advertising services revenue reached $19.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 26% year-over-year and the strongest rate in the six quarters Amazon discloses in its supplemental data. Sponsored prompts converted clicking shoppers 48% more often, Ads Agent users recorded 8% lower cost per impression and 6% lower cost per acquisition, and live sports inventory sold out across Thursday Night Football, NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR.

When: Amazon announced the results on July 30, 2026, for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, a period that included Prime Day from June 23-26 in the United States after the 2025 edition fell entirely in the third quarter.

Where: The results cover Amazon's worldwide operations, with advertising revenue reported inside the North America and International segments, Ads Agent expanding to 11 new countries in 2026, and Alexa+ reaching Germany, Austria, France, and Brazil.

Why: Advertising grew faster than every other reported Amazon revenue line except AWS and nearly twice as fast as Alphabet's advertising business in the same quarter, while the first conversion data for paid placements inside AI shopping assistants and sold-out premium sports inventory indicate where the company expects the next phase of demand to concentrate.