Amazon announced that it’s beta testing ads that will let viewers make direct purchases on IMDb TV, either through their Alexa or their Fire TV remote. Shoppable video ads aren’t new, but what’s exciting about Amazon’s announcement is that the ads are coming to the biggest screen in the house via Amazon Fire TVs.

Growth was driven by search revenues from Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, while video ad revenues on properties including Amazon Fire TV, Twitch, and IMDb TV grew significantly as well.

In addition to selling ads on its ecommerce marketplace and elsewhere on the web, Amazon has an increasing amount of video ad inventory on owned and operated media properties including Twitch, IMDb TV, and Fire TV. In our estimates, we break out our traditional categories of search and display.

Of the remaining half, a large chunk likely goes to Amazon, which sells CTV inventory that appears on its Fire TV operating system as well as its IMDb TV streaming service. While Fire TV has fewer users than Roku does, Amazon can monetize its users more effectively by leveraging shopper/retail data that advertisers crave, said Dave Morgan, founder and CEO of TV targeting company Simulmedia.

Tubi, Pluto TV, and Crackle all currently license MGM content, for example. In the long run, as those deals begin to expire, the company could also opt to make MGM content exclusive to Prime Video or IMDb TV.

Amazon has a lot of catching up to do with Roku, but it’s also been rapidly building out its ad offerings on Fire TV and its ad-supported streamer IMDb TV. On the streamer side, YouTube was the largest CTV ad seller in the US last year, and we expect more viewing on the platform to shift to CTV screens in the future.

Of the remaining half, a large chunk likely goes to Amazon, which sells CTV inventory that appears on its Fire TV operating system as well as its IMDb TV streaming service. Other companies with significant CTV advertising revenue streams include TV makers such as Samsung and Vizio; TV networks such as NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, and ViacomCBS; and publishers that partner with YouTube, Hulu, and Roku.

With a growing inventory of premium ad-supported video—which includes IMDb TV, certain live sports, and perhaps one day Prime Video—the opportunity appears even larger. Now imagine Amazon introducing direct-response TV ads using the voice-activated Fire TV Remote.

The video streaming long tail includes ad-supported video on-demand (AVOD) services like Tubi, Amazon-owned IMDb TV, Sony Crackle, Popcornflix, Xumo and Viacom-owned Pluto TV. TV makers Samsung and Vizio launched free streaming services, too. These services are growing but are small compared with YouTube, Roku or Hulu.

More people are leaving pay TV for digital alternatives, as TV networks increase their subscription costs and end promotional prices.

Ad dollars and viewers are pouring into digital video platforms as the TV industry continues to lose subscribers.

US digital video ad spending is on track to exceed our previous forecasts, while TV also got a bump thanks to increased political spending in H2 2018.

As Netflix moves to lift its subscription prices, new streaming services are looking to chip away at its base. In the latest episode of "Behind the Numbers," we take a look at the expanding list of competitors in the streaming space, and how consumers may respond.

eMarketer forecasting analyst Eric Haggstrom breaks down Amazon’s ad business for search and display.

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.

While not all of Amazon’s ad business is retail-related—the company also sell ads on properties like IMDb TV and Twitch—the majority of ad revenues come from sponsored product and search ads on its retail channels. Amazon’s US ad revenues will grow 53% this year, reaching $11.33 billion, or 8.8% of total digital ad spending in the US. Amazon isn't the only one making use of its valuable real estate.

Display formats are gaining share as Amazon adds inventory (for example, video inventory in the IMDb TV free over-the-top [OTT] service) and beefs up the capabilities of its demand-side platform (DSP). But search will continue to dominate as a portion of ad revenues through at least 2021. Amazon’s strength in search is surpassed only by Google.

Already, there are signs that Amazon harbors TV advertising ambitions, with its continued content investments in Prime Video (which is today not ad-supported but could be in the future) and content rights acquisitions for NFL Thursday Night Football, Premier League, and back-catalog TV shows and movies on IMDb TV.

Other global competitors planning to enter the market include Apple TV+ (launching this year), Disney+ and HBO Max (2020) and IMDb TV (later this year).

Amazon, which already owned Twitch, further expanded into the ad-supported streaming market this year with IMDb Freedive. And the expected launch of NBCUniversal’s streaming service in 2020 will bring another major player to the ad-supported OTT market. Some of this content is being viewed on mobile devices, according to October 2018 data from video measurement and intelligence platform Conviva.

But there will be some bright spots this year with regard to identity graphs, especially with regard to audience identification across both TV and digital.