Walmart Just Made a Big Move to Take on Amazon's Fastest-Growing Business

Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) advertising business has provided a huge boost to the online retail giant's profitability over the last couple of years. Management reported its "Other" revenue, which primarily consists of advertising sales, grew 45% in the third quarter on top of 123% growth in the same quarter in 2018. It also said advertising revenue is growing faster than its reported segment. That makes it, by far, the company's fastest-growing business (of scale).

That hasn't gone unnoticed by Walmart (NYSE: WMT), which has been aggressively going after Amazon's e-commerce domain. While Walmart has had advertising products (both online and in-store) for decades, its online advertising business just took the next step to compete with Amazon, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google, and other digital advertising tech companies.

Marketers can now buy ads on Walmart.com programmatically through a self-serve platform. Additionally, it's making its ad inventory available through its API and several ad-technology partners. Previously, Walmart required marketers to use its managed services to launch campaigns across its various digital properties and in its stores.

Source Fool.com