Amazon · retail media

How much does Amazon earn from your data?

Amazon's advertising arm passed $68 billion in 2025, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry, and it is built on the most commercially loaded dataset there is: what you actually buy. Amazon doesn't disclose customer counts, so the per-shopper band below is wide on purpose.

How Amazon turns you into revenue

Search ads on Amazon convert like nothing else in advertising because the searcher is standing in the store with a wallet out. Brands pay to appear when you type "running shoes"; they pay again for display ads that follow your browsing; since 2024 they also pay to reach you inside Prime Video. Q4 2025 alone brought $21.3 billion, up 22% year over year — growth built not on more shoppers but on pricing your purchase history more aggressively.

The honest caveat: Amazon reports ad revenue but not active customers, so any per-shopper figure divides a public number by an estimated one. We show a wide band rather than fake a precise figure — the methodology page explains the derivation and its limits.

What the price is built on

• Complete purchase history — the highest-value commercial dataset per person.
• Product searches and browsing inside the store.
• Wish lists, cart abandons and repeat-purchase rhythms.
• Streaming and device signals (Prime Video ads, Fire TV) joined to the same account.

Turn it down

Amazon advertising preferences ↗ opts you out of personalized ads (the shopping data itself stays, and contextual ads continue). Browsing history can be cleared and switched off separately under "Your browsing history". The full ranked plan is on the take-it-back page.

Sources: Amazon FY2025 results (advertising services revenue), Q4 2025 earnings; analyst customer-count estimates. Working on the methodology page. Figures as of August 2026.