Amazon ad sales grew 12% in Q3, down from 26%. Amazon blames the Prime Day date

Amazon’s ad sales reached $19.64bn in the third quarter of 2026, according to the results release Amazon published on 29 October. A year earlier the figure was $17.70bn, so reported growth was 11%. Without currency effects it was 12%.

That is a sharp drop in pace. In the second quarter, ad revenue grew 26% excluding currency. In each of the four quarters before that, growth was 22%. Ad revenue in the third quarter was also slightly lower in dollars than in the second, when it reached $19.81bn.

Amazon says Prime Day moved from Q3 to Q2

Amazon put the slowdown down to “timing anomalies primarily related to Prime Day”. In 2025 the sale fell entirely in the third quarter. In 2026 it ran in the second quarter in most large countries. Ad budgets on Amazon tend to rise around the sale.

Amazon did not publish an adjusted ad growth rate. It gave one only for total sales, which would have grown about 4 percentage points faster without the shift. For the fourth quarter, Amazon expects ad revenue to grow “in the high teens” year on year. The same quarter last year brought $21.32bn.

Thursday Night Football audience up 16% on Prime Video

Prime Video carries Amazon’s TV ads. Thursday Night Football averaged 17.7 million viewers over the first six games of the season, Amazon said, citing Nielsen. That is 16% above last season’s full average. The NBA season-opening doubleheader on Prime drew more than two million US viewers. Amazon does not report Prime Video ad revenue on its own.

Amazon Ads Agent now runs one campaign across all formats

The release also says Full-Funnel Campaigns are open to all US advertisers inside Amazon Ads Agent. One campaign now covers sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV. Amazon moved its ad tools behind one AI agent earlier this autumn. It gave no usage figures. Its shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, reached more than 400 million customers in 12 months, Amazon said.

Google’s ad business grew 10.6% in the same quarter, so the two giants now report similar growth rates.

Brands selling on Amazon can check the same effect in their own reports. If their Prime Day spend sat in July 2025 but in the spring quarter of 2026, a July-to-September comparison in the ad console will show a drop that is mostly about the calendar.