Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTWill Healy, The Motley FoolSat, July 25, 2026 at 3:08 PM GMT+2 3 min readConsumers know Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) best for its retail footprint. Investors, who tend to do a deeper dive on the company, tend to focus on the profitability of Amazon Web Services and Amazon's AI business.Nonetheless, one other source of revenue has driven higher growth. Better still, that business directly leverages the company's e-commerce site, which is visited by an estimated 2.2 billion people monthly.Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »Image source: The Motley Fool.Amazon's lesser-known business segmentInvestors often forget about Amazon's advertising services business.Advertising services generated over $17 billion in net sales in the first quarter of 2026, about 9.5% of the company's total. On a trailing-12-month basis, it grew by 24% year over year. That was well above the 17% net sales growth for the overall company, and third only to AWS and Amazon's "other" category in terms of growth.Admittedly, Amazon itself is probably to blame for this segment attracting relatively little attention. The only metric the company publishes for this business is net sales. Moreover, Amazon divides its advertising services revenues among the North America and international segments, and offers no clarity about how much it contributes to each of them.So investors have no idea how much operating income the ad business generates. This is significant because such ad businesses tend to have little additional overhead as they scale. Since Amazon has underperformed in 2026, knowing more about how that segment is performing could give investors a reason to buy the stock.Ultimately, the outlook for the advertising business is probably an excellent reason to buy Amazon stock. It will probably remain a vibrant growth area for the company. Furthermore, even if Amazon chooses not to provide more clarity on how advertising benefits the company's financials, having a major business that's growing as fast as its advertising services unit is can only be good for the consumer discretionary stock over the long term.Should you buy stock in Amazon right now?Before you buy stock in Amazon, consider this:The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Amazon wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info