Amazon: The Rival That Owns the PurchaseNarrow moat

Amazon's advertising business is the most serious commercial threat to Meta, and it did not come from a social network. It came from a shop.

The problem is attribution. Meta can tell an advertiser that someone saw an ad and later bought something, inferred from signals it increasingly does not control. Amazon can tell an advertiser that someone saw an ad and bought that product, in the same session, on the same page — closed-loop evidence rather than modelled inference. For any advertiser selling a product Amazon carries, that certainty is worth a premium, and it is a premium Meta cannot pay because it does not own the transaction.

That business is now enormous. Amazon's advertising revenue passed $70 billion on a trailing basis¹ and continues to grow faster than either Meta's or Google's, taking budget from precisely the direct-response advertisers that are Meta's core. Meta's counter — the one Amazon cannot copy — is reach into categories with no retail transaction to attribute, and discovery of products the buyer was not searching for.

Watch Meta's performance among e-commerce advertisers specifically. Meta delivered 12% more ad impressions in 2025 at 9% higher prices², which says advertisers are not leaving. Prices flattening while impressions grow would suggest that the demand at the top of the auction — the retail money — has found somewhere with better proof.