Walmart now earns more revenue from selling ads than Snapchat or Pinterest and is positioned to become even bigger in the industry, according to The Information.
The company's ad revenue reached nearly $6.4B in fiscal 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, accounting for around 4.3% of its e-commerce revenue, which last year surpassed $150B. In comparison, advertising accounted for around 12% of Amazon's digital revenue last year, which excludes AWS and Amazon's physical stores, indicating that as a proportion of total revenue, Walmart's ad business has a ton of potential growth ahead of it.
Walmart has been in the digital advertising business for about a decade, but has recently been diversifying its ad unit with several acquisitions including Vibe last month and Vizio in 2024.
Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told investors in February:
“If you look at our advertising as a percent of GMV, we are still very much kind of middle of the pack. We have a tremendous amount of opportunity to grow that through our own capabilities, but also the denominator is growing as well, as we’re growing that GMV.”
Then in April, Rainey said on another investor call that Walmart can “easily double what we're doing today to get to what best in class is, in terms of advertising as a percentage of GMV.”
Wow! Remember when Walmart didn't take e-commerce that seriously and sat back for more than two decades as Amazon grew into an online behemoth? Well, those days appear to be gone, and now that Walmart's got a taste for the high-margin addiction of retail advertising, they don't appear to ever be coming back. In other words, get ready for more sponsored listings in your Walmart search results!
I guess there's money to be made from advertisements? And now, a word from our sponsor…
