How Big Is Retail Media Now? What 17 Sources and 12 Company Filings Show

How big retail media is

In the United States, commerce and retail media generated $63.4 billion in ad revenue in 2025, up 18%, according to the IAB/PwC annual revenue census.¹ That is 21.5% of the $294.6 billion internet ad market, which grew 13.9% overall.¹ Retail media grew faster than search ($114.2 billion, up 11%) and display ($81.6 billion, up 9.8%), but slower than social ($117.7 billion, up 32.6%) and digital video including CTV ($78 billion, up 25.4%).¹

The IAB categories overlap, so their shares of spend add to more than 100%. A sponsored product video, for example, can count as both commerce and video. The $63.4 billion figure is best read as the size of the commerce slice, not a separate pile of money.¹

Globally, two independent agency forecasts land in the same range. Magna put retail media networks at $163 billion for 2025, against a total ad market of $979 billion.¹¹ WPP Media sized commerce advertising at $178.2 billion for 2025, enough to pass total TV advertising ($167.5 billion, up 0.7%) for the first time.¹² WPP's commerce category also includes finance and travel media, which is why its figure runs higher than Magna's.¹²

Magna's breakdown also shows where retail media takes its money. Retailer search, the sponsored listings inside store search results, reached $140 billion and grew 12%, while core search on Google and Bing reached $217 billion and grew 7%.¹¹ Social media, at $242 billion, grew 11%.¹¹

Amazon: a $68.6 billion ad business that is speeding up

Amazon's four quarters of 2025 add up to $68.6 billion in advertising services revenue.³ Its fourth quarter alone was $21.3 billion, up 23% from $17.3 billion a year earlier.³ Excluding currency effects, growth ran at 19% in the first quarter of 2025 and 22% in each of the next three.³

Growth has not slowed with scale. The first quarter of 2026 brought $17.2 billion, again 22% currency-neutral growth, and the second quarter hit $19.8 billion at 26%.⁴

Walmart and Target: the fastest growth among US retailers

Walmart's global advertising business grew 46% to nearly $6.4 billion in fiscal 2026, a figure that includes the VIZIO television business it bought.⁵ Strip VIZIO out and the core US network still grew fast: Walmart Connect rose 41% in the fourth quarter.⁵ Walmart's international ad business grew more slowly, 10% in the fourth quarter and 19% for the year.⁵

Against Walmart's $713.2 billion in revenue, which grew 4.7%, advertising is still a small line.⁵ It is growing roughly ten times faster than the company around it.

Target's filing shows the same pattern from a shrinking base. Advertising revenue rose to $915 million in fiscal 2025 from $649 million, a 41% increase, while total net sales fell 1.7% to $104.8 billion.⁹ Fourth-quarter advertising revenue was $295 million, up 55% from $190 million.⁹ Target notes that some services from Roundel, its ad network, are booked as reductions in costs rather than as sales, so the reported advertising line understates the network's full activity.⁹

Kroger does not report retail media revenue at all. It reports profit: Kroger Precision Marketing's profit grew 24% in the quarter ended August 15, 2026, while adjusted eCommerce sales grew 20%.⁸

Marketplaces: ads as a fixed slice of every sale

Marketplaces report advertising as a share of the goods sold through them, which makes the economics easy to see. eBay's ad products generated $544 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, equal to 2.6% of gross merchandise volume.⁶ First-party ads on eBay's own platform grew 19% to $517 million.⁶ In the same quarter eBay's GMV grew 10% to $21.2 billion, so first-party ads grew nearly twice as fast as the goods moving through the site.⁶ For the full year, GMV was $79.6 billion, up 7%, and total revenue was $11.1 billion, up 8%.⁶

Instacart crossed $1 billion. Its advertising and other revenue reached $1,065 million in 2025, up 11%, equal to 2.9% of gross transaction value.⁷ In the fourth quarter it was $294 million, up 10%, or 3.0% of GTV.⁷ More than 9,000 brands advertised in that quarter, up from over 7,000 a year earlier, and the number of retailers running Instacart's Carrot Ads technology rose from 220 to more than 310.⁷ Instacart's total revenue grew 11% to $3,742 million, the same rate as advertising.⁷

Outside North America, growth is faster still. MercadoLibre's advertising revenue grew 62% on a currency-neutral basis in the second quarter of 2026, and the company says it now holds more than 10% of Latin America's digital ad market.¹⁰ Sea's Shopee reported ad revenue up more than 70% and its ad take rate up more than 90 basis points, on GMV growth of 28%.¹³ In Southeast Asia, Grab's count of active self-serve advertisers grew 21% and their average spend grew 24%.¹⁷ Grab's deliveries revenue rose 21% to $531 million, a gain it attributes partly to advertising.¹⁷

Where growth has stalled

The filings do not show uniform growth. China's three largest e-commerce platforms, where advertising is already a large share of the business, have slowed sharply.

PDD Holdings, the owner of Pinduoduo and Temu, reported online marketing revenue of RMB 57.6 billion (US$8.5 billion) in the second quarter of 2026, up 3.5% from RMB 55.7 billion.¹⁴ That is about half of PDD's RMB 112.4 billion in quarterly revenue.¹⁴ Its transaction services revenue grew 13% in the same quarter, nearly four times as fast.¹⁴ Alibaba's customer management revenue, mainly merchant marketing on Taobao and Tmall, fell 7%; the company says it would have grown 1% on a like-for-like basis without a new merchant incentive program.¹⁵ JD.com's marketplace and marketing revenues grew 8.3% in the quarter and 12.9% for the first half, even as JD's total net revenue fell 2.9%.¹⁶

The split follows how large advertising already is. At PDD, where online marketing is about half of revenue, ad growth is in low single digits.¹⁴ At Amazon, where ads are 9.9% of net sales, growth has risen to 26%.⁴ Networks in Latin America and Southeast Asia are growing at 60% or more.¹⁰¹³

What buyers expect for the rest of 2026

US ad buyers raised their expectations through 2026. In the IAB's September survey of 211 brand and agency decision-makers, buyers projected commerce media spend to grow 13.6% this year, up from 12.1% in the January survey.² Total US ad spend is now projected to grow 12.3%, up from 9.5%.²

That puts commerce media ahead of paid search (8.1%) and display (6.7%), and behind social (16.5%) and CTV (15.6%).² It is the same ranking the IAB/PwC census recorded for 2025: retail media grows faster than the market, but it is no longer the fastest-growing format.¹²

Reading the numbers

Three limits apply to this data. First, 12 of the 15 organizations behind these figures are the companies selling the ads, reporting their own results; the figures come from financial filings, which carry legal liability, but the categories are defined by each company. Second, definitions differ. Amazon reports advertising services, Instacart reports advertising and other revenue, Kroger reports profit only, and Alibaba's customer management revenue includes more than display and search ads.³⁷⁸¹⁵ Third, the industry totals measure different things: IAB/PwC counts US revenue, Magna counts retail media networks globally, and WPP Media's commerce category adds finance and travel media.¹¹¹¹²

Within those limits, the data agrees on the direction. Retail media is now more than a fifth of US internet ad revenue, it has passed TV globally on at least one major measure, and its largest seller, Amazon, is growing faster in 2026 than it did in 2025.¹³⁴¹²