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The Amazon logo displayed on a smartphone and a PC screen.
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Search for “toothpaste” on Amazon, and the top of the web page will show you a mix of popular brands like Colgate, Crest and Sensodyne. Try a separate search for “deodorant” and you’ll first see products from Secret, Dove and Native.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll notice that those listings are advertisements with the “sponsored” label affixed to them. Amazon is generating hefty revenue from the top consumer brands because getting valuable placement on the biggest e-commerce site comes with a rising price tag.

“There’s fewer organic search results on the page, so that increasingly means the only way to get on the page is to buy your way on there,” said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at advertising firm Publicis.

For consumers looking for toothpaste on Amazon, getting to unpaid results requires two full swipes up on the mobile app.

An example of a mobile search for “toothpaste” on Amazon shows a sponsored brand ad at the top of results.

Until recently, Amazon put two or three sponsored products at the top of search results. Now, there may be as many as six sponsored products that appear ahead of any organic results, with more promotions elsewhere on the page, said Juozas Kaziukenas, who runs e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.

The number of ads that appear differs depending on the exact search term and other factors such as whether users are shopping on desktop, mobile or in the Amazon app, Amazon says.

While Amazon doesn’t break out advertising revenue, ads account for the majority of the company’s “other” sales. That category was the fastest-growing part of Amazon’s overall business in the second quarter, with revenue soaring 87% from a year earlier to more than $7.9 billion.

In 2018, Amazon leapfrogged Microsoft to become the third-largest ad platform in the U.S., trailing only Google and Facebook. Amazon is capitalizing on its market control, knowing that its website or app is where many consumers begin their online shopping journey.

Kaziukenas said Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos have completely transformed from being anti-advertising. It’s become such a lucrative business that ads “have replaced most of the functionality on the site,” he said.

An Amazon spokesperson said there are no dedicated ad slots within search results, meaning that a user may see one ad, multiple ads or none at all. The company said advertising is an optional service for brands and sellers, but that using it can improve visibility of their products.

“Like all retailers, we design our store to help customers easily find and discover the right brands and products, and sponsored ads is one of the many ways we do this,” the spokesperson said in an email. “In all cases we work back from the most useful customer experience and the relevance of the results surfaced, regardless of how they’re presented to the shopper.”

Big consumer products makers aren’t the only ones taking up the most valuable virtual real estate. Amazon is also populating search results with its own products. For example, a search for “shampoo” pulls up a promotion for a bottle of Amazon brand Solimo before ads for products from Pantene, Nexxus, L’Oreal and others.

Sponsored product ads accounted for roughly 73% of retailers’ ad spend on Amazon in the second quarter, according to digital marketing agency Merkle. Last year, Amazon began replacing product recommendations in listings with product ads.

Amazon has also added new ad formats like video ads and sponsored brands posts, which feature a single brand and several product listings in a banner at the top of the page.

Ad prices going up

For brand owners, the price of doing business on Amazon is surging as the company expands its dominance in online commerce.

The cost per click for Amazon search advertising was $1.27 in August, up from 86 cents a year ago, according to a survey of more than 300 Amazon sellers conducted by Canopy Management, an agency that helps manage businesses on Amazon.

Companies that don’t pay the toll are finding their listings buried in search results. At the same time, sellers are paying more overall to Amazon for things like transaction fees and fulfillment services.

“It’s not uncommon now for brands to be spending 50% or more of their product price on various fees to be selling on Amazon,” Kaziukenas said.

Competition has also intensified as a result of the rise of Amazon aggregators, venture-backed companies that are raising big money from outside investors to acquire independent sellers. Some smaller sellers are concerned they may not be able to compete against deep-pocketed aggregators, which are bringing “massive budgets to be spent on Amazon, also in the form of advertising,” Kaziukenas said.

“They’re going from competing against other, smaller sellers to now competing against massive and well-funded sellers,” he said.

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Micron beats on earnings as company sales rise 46% on AI boom

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Micron beats on earnings as company sales rise 46% on AI boom

A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.

The stock rose in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
  • Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected

Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.

The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.

Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.

“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.

Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.

Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.

However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.

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YouTube to allow creators banned for Covid-19, election misinformation to apply for reinstatement

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YouTube to allow creators banned for Covid-19, election misinformation to apply for reinstatement

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Google-owned YouTube on Tuesday said it will soon allow previously banned accounts to apply for reinstatement, rolling back a policy that had treated violations as permanent.

The change applies to channels removed for posting Covid-19 or election-related misinformation, according to a letter from Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Previously, those types of offenses carried lifetime bans.

“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding Covid and elections integrity,” Donovan wrote.

YouTube wrote on X that it will be a limited pilot project open to a subset of creators as well as channels that were terminated under policies the company has since retired. YouTube also said its new reinstatement program will launch soon.

Among channels previously banned under those rules were some associated with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s not yet clear whether those channels will be reinstated.

This move follows mounting Republican pressure on tech companies to reverse Biden-era speech policies on vaccine and political misinformation. In March, Rep. Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging YouTube was a “direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”

In 2021, YouTube said it would remove content that spread misinformation about all approved vaccines.

Donovan wrote that during the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials pressed the company to remove certain Covid-related videos that did not technically violate YouTube’s policies.

In the letter, Donovan said this pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”

YouTube ended its stand-alone Covid misinformation rules in December 2024, according to Donovan’s letter.

YouTube “will not empower third-party fact-checkers” to moderate content and will continue to enable “free expression” on the platform, Donovan wrote. While Donovan writes that YouTube has not used fact-checkers, the platform has produced programs that are meant to label context on videos.

Similarly, Meta said in January that it had eliminated its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram.

YouTube has a feature that will display information panels with links to independent fact checks under videos. The feature says it provides more context on videos across YouTube with information from third-party sources.

In 2017, Google launched a fact-checking tool that would display labels on search and news results.

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Amazon to close all of its Fresh grocery stores in UK

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Amazon to close all of its Fresh grocery stores in UK

People walk past an Amazon Fresh store in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2021.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

Amazon plans to close all of its Fresh supermarkets in the U.K., in the latest recalibration of its grocery strategy.

The company said in a Tuesday blog that it’s preparing to close all 19 of its Fresh U.K. stores, “following a thorough evaluation of business operations and the very substantial growth opportunities in online delivery.” Five of the Fresh locations are expected to be converted into Whole Foods stores, Amazon said.

Amazon opened its first Fresh location outside the U.S. in London in 2021, about a year after it debuted the store concept in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fresh stores offer cheaper prices and more mass-market items compared to Whole Foods, the upscale supermarket chain Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion in 2017. Many of the stores also feature Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology.

The Fresh store pullback in the U.K. comes as Amazon has continued to adjust its grocery ambitions. The company has slowed expansion of its Fresh grocery chain and Go cashierless stores in the U.S. It still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

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At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items like canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks.

Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

The company on Tuesday also said that it plans to offer same-day delivery of groceries, including perishable items, in the U.K. beginning next year.

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