Amazon makes most of its money from keyword-targeted, CPC-based placements—that is, from search ads. For the first time in two years, we have broken out estimates of search vs. display advertising at Amazon. We estimate that Amazon will earn 72% of its US net digital ad revenues from search ads this year, a figure that will drop slightly to 70% by 2021.
Amazon has recently announced several ad product changes, like IMDb TV, that could boost branding-oriented display ad spending on its owned and operated properties—as well as innovations like a data clean room (a tool for comparing first-party and aggregated data), which could foster more display spending via Amazon's demand-side platform.