Retail Media in America 2026
Retail media has completed its transformation from a niche sponsored-product afterthought into one of the fastest-growing pillars of American digital advertising, now rivaling search and social in strategic importance for brands nationwide. According to eMarketer’s H1 2026 forecast, US advertisers will spend $71.09 billion on retail media in 2026, up roughly 18% year-over-year from $60.32 billion in 2025, pushing the channel to represent nearly 30% of all US digital ad spending, up from just 15% in 2022. At the center of this growth sits Amazon Ads, whose commanding share of US e-commerce has translated directly into an equally commanding share of retail media dollars, though the exact scale of that dominance varies depending on which analyst firm’s methodology is used.
This report lays out the most current, verified retail media statistics for the United States in 2026, sourced from eMarketer, WARC/WPP Media, Skai and Stratably, and industry trade research. Readers will find figures on total US retail media market size, Amazon’s specific advertising revenue and market share, Walmart Connect and the emerging second tier of networks, global market comparisons, the rapid growth of off-site retail media formats, and the measurement challenges advertisers still face. Every number reflects the latest published market data, giving marketers, brand advertisers, and agencies a single reliable reference point on where retail media truly stands today.
It is worth noting upfront that retail media data carries a genuine methodological complexity rarely found in more established advertising categories like search or television. Because different research firms define “retail media” with varying scope, some including only onsite sponsored placements, others folding in offsite social and streaming inventory, and still others counting the entire commerce media ecosystem, headline figures can differ by tens of billions of dollars depending on which source is cited. This article addresses that complexity directly rather than glossing over it, attributing every figure to its specific source and scope so readers can make informed comparisons rather than assuming a single universally agreed-upon number exists.
Interesting Facts About Retail Media in the US 2026
Before the detailed breakdown, here is a quick-reference table of standout figures defining US retail media this year.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| US retail media ad spend, 2026 (eMarketer H1 2026 forecast) | $71.09 billion (+18% YoY) |
| US retail media ad spend, 2025 | $60.32 billion |
| Retail media share of total US digital ad spend, 2026 | ~30% (up from 15% in 2022) |
| Amazon’s US retail media ad revenue, 2026 | $56.71 billion (+17.9% YoY) |
| Amazon’s share of US retail media spend | 69%–77% (varies by methodology) |
| Walmart Connect US ad revenue, 2026 | $5.99 billion |
| Global retail media ad spend, 2026 (WARC/WPP) | $196.7 billion (+12.4% YoY) |
| Retail media share of global ad spend, 2026 | ~16% |
| Amazon + Walmart share of 2026 incremental RMN spend | 89% ($9.42B of $10.53B net-new) |
| Distinct retail media networks operating globally | 277+ (as of Nov. 2025) |
Source: eMarketer, “Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast H1 2026,” 2026; eMarketer, “FAQ on Amazon advertising,” 2026; WARC/WPP Media, November 2025.
These figures confirm that retail media has moved decisively from an experimental ad category into a core, board-level line item for American marketers. With spend approaching $71 billion and representing close to 30% of all US digital ad spending, the channel has grown from a rounding error just four years ago into a genuine third pillar of digital advertising alongside search and social. This growth trajectory places retail media on pace to overtake combined linear and connected TV ad spend globally in 2026, according to WARC’s analysis, a milestone that would have seemed implausible even three years ago.
Yet this growth is remarkably concentrated: Amazon and Walmart together are projected to capture 89% of all incremental new retail media dollars in 2026, roughly $9.42 billion of the $10.53 billion in net-new investment flowing into the category, leaving the remaining 277-plus retail media networks worldwide to compete for a shrinking slice of new growth. This concentration dynamic, where two players dominate an increasingly crowded field, mirrors patterns seen elsewhere in digital advertising, a competitive structure closely tied to the broader search and discovery shifts covered in our Social Media SEO Statistics coverage of how platform dominance shapes marketer channel allocation decisions.
US Retail Media Market Size: A Note on Methodology
US Retail Media Ad Spend: Competing Forecasts, 2026
eMarketer H1 2026 Forecast ████████████ $71.09B
eMarketer Sept. 2025 Forecast ███████████░ $69.33B
Broader "Commerce Media" Estimate █████████████████████ $128B
| Forecast Source | US Retail Media Spend, 2026 | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| eMarketer, H1 2026 forecast | $71.09 billion | Onsite + offsite retail media |
| eMarketer, September 2025 forecast | $69.33 billion | Onsite + offsite retail media |
| Broader “commerce media” estimate (industry trade) | ~$128 billion | Includes marketplaces, wider commerce media |
| US retail media ad spend, 2025 (eMarketer) | $60.32 billion | Comparable base year |
| Year-over-year growth (eMarketer H1 2026) | +18% | — |
Source: eMarketer, “Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast H1 2026,” 2026; CO Consulting, “47 Retail Media Statistics, Trends, and Data Points for 2026,” July 2026, citing eMarketer, WARC/WPP Media, IAB and PwC.
Anyone researching retail media statistics quickly encounters a genuine methodological challenge: figures vary meaningfully across analyst firms because “retail media” is not a uniformly defined category. eMarketer’s most current H1 2026 forecast places US retail media spend at $71.09 billion, while its own September 2025 forecast, produced just months earlier, cited $69.33 billion, a normal revision reflecting updated data rather than a contradiction. More significantly, some industry trade sources cite a considerably larger figure near $128 billion for 2026, a difference that stems from a broader “commerce media” definition encompassing marketplace advertising and wider e-commerce-adjacent ad formats that narrower retail-media-specific forecasts exclude entirely.
Independent research firm CO Consulting, which compiles retail media statistics specifically for cross-source comparison, explicitly cautions that “retail media forecasts are not directly comparable across firms” given these scope differences, advising readers to “treat cross-source comparisons as directional, not exact.” This article follows that guidance by consistently citing eMarketer’s $71.09 billion figure as its primary US market-size reference, since eMarketer remains the most widely cited and methodologically consistent source tracked across multiple years, while noting the broader commerce-media estimates separately rather than blending incompatible figures into a single misleading total.
Amazon Ads: The Dominant Force in US Retail Media
Amazon's US Retail Media Market Share, 2025-2026
Amazon ██████████████████████████ 69%-77%
Walmart ██████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 7%-10%
All Other Networks ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 16%-24%
| Amazon Ads Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Amazon’s US retail media ad revenue, 2026 | $56.71 billion (+17.9% YoY) |
| Amazon’s global ad revenue, 2025 | ~$60 billion |
| Amazon’s share of US e-commerce sales | 40.6% |
| Amazon’s share of US retail media ad spend, 2025 | ~77% (Statista/eMarketer) |
| Amazon’s share of US retail media ad spend (alternate estimate) | 69% (Improvado, citing eMarketer) |
| Amazon projected retail media revenue by 2028 | $75 billion+ |
| Amazon’s YoY US ad growth vs. Meta (14.2%) and Google (5.6%) | 17.9% (fastest of the three) |
Source: eMarketer, “FAQ on Amazon advertising: Retail media dominance, Prime Video scale, and agentic ad tools,” 2026; Statista, citing eMarketer, November 2024; eMarketer, “Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast H1 2026.”
Amazon Ads stands as the unambiguous center of gravity in US retail media, with its advertising business projected to generate $56.71 billion in US retail media revenue in 2026, a 17.9% year-over-year increase that actually outpaces the growth rates posted by both Meta (14.2%) and Google (5.6%) over the same period, even though Amazon’s absolute ad revenue still trails both of those larger platforms. This growth is fundamentally rooted in Amazon’s underlying commerce dominance: the company’s 40.6% share of all US e-commerce sales gives it an enormous, continuously refreshed pool of first-party shopper data and high-intent advertising inventory that competing retail media networks simply cannot match at scale.
Estimates of Amazon’s precise share of the total US retail media market vary from 69% to 77% depending on the analyst firm and methodology used, a range that nonetheless leaves no doubt about the company’s overwhelming market position. Looking ahead, eMarketer projects Amazon’s retail media revenue will exceed $75 billion by 2028, a figure that would place it more than $65 billion ahead of the next-largest retail media network, underscoring that the gap between Amazon and every competitor is not just large today but is expected to widen further over the coming years rather than narrow.
This widening gap carries strategic implications for advertisers beyond simple market-share statistics. As Amazon’s share of incremental retail media growth continues to climb, the company gains increasing auction leverage and pricing power over the sponsored placements advertisers depend on, meaning the effective cost of reaching Amazon shoppers is likely to rise even as competing networks work to offer comparable audiences at lower prices. Industry analysts increasingly advise brands to treat retail media diversification, deliberately allocating meaningful budget to Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target, and other networks even when Amazon delivers superior short-term performance, as a hedge against this concentrating pricing power rather than purely an inefficiency to be minimized.
Walmart Connect and the Second Tier of Retail Media Networks
Second-Tier US Retail Media Networks, 2026 (Ad Revenue)
Walmart Connect █████████████████████████████████ $5.99B
Instacart Ads ███████████████████████████░░░░░░ $1B+ (TTM, Q3 2025)
| Second-Tier Network Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Walmart Connect US ad revenue, 2026 | $5.99 billion |
| Walmart’s share of US retail media spend | ~7%–10% |
| Top 3 networks’ (Amazon, Walmart, Target) combined US market share | ~74% |
| Instacart Ads trailing-twelve-month revenue, Q3 2025 | $1 billion+ |
| Instacart’s reach across North American households | 95% |
| Instacart store locations covered | 100,000+ |
| Instacart Ads Manager self-serve expansion | May 2026 |
Source: eMarketer, “FAQ on Amazon advertising,” 2026; Improvado, “Top 15 Retail Media Networks 2026: Rankings & Benchmarks”; DigitalApplied, “Retail Media vs In-House Ad Spend: 2026 Decision Matrix,” June 2026.
Walmart Connect holds a clear but distant second place in the US retail media hierarchy, generating an estimated $5.99 billion in ad revenue for 2026, representing roughly 7% to 10% of total US retail media spend depending on the source consulted. Combined with Target’s retail media presence, the top three US networks control approximately 74% of the entire domestic market, leaving the long tail of more than 150 additional networks to compete for what remains a comparatively modest and shrinking share of new advertiser investment.
Beyond the top three, Instacart Ads has emerged as one of the more notable growth stories among second-tier retail media networks, surpassing $1 billion in trailing-twelve-month ad revenue as of the third quarter of 2025 while reaching 95% of North American households across more than 100,000 store locations. The platform expanded its Ads Manager self-serve tools to additional retail partners in May 2026, a move that reflects the broader industry trend of mid-sized retail media networks racing to build out more sophisticated, self-service advertising infrastructure in an effort to capture advertiser budgets that might otherwise flow disproportionately toward Amazon and Walmart, a competitive dynamic connected to the broader digital advertising landscape explored in our US Digital Marketing Statistics coverage of how US businesses are allocating spend across the modern advertising ecosystem.
Global Retail Media Market Trends in 2026
Global Retail Media Ad Spend Trend
2024 ████████████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░ $140B
2025 ██████████████████████████████████████████░░░░ $174.9B
2026 ██████████████████████████████████████████████ $196.7B
| Global Market Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Global retail media ad spend, 2024 | ~$140 billion |
| Global retail media ad spend, 2025 | $174.9 billion (+13.7% YoY) |
| Global retail media ad spend, 2026 (forecast) | $196.7 billion (+12.4% YoY) |
| Retail media share of global ad spend, 2026 | ~16% |
| Total global ad spend, 2026 (all channels, Statista) | $1.25 trillion |
| UK: Amazon’s share of retail media spend | ~73% |
| Amazon + Walmart share of US retail media (alternate high estimate) | 84%+ |
Source: WARC/WPP Media, November 2025; Statista, 2026 global ad spend forecast; Adtelligent, “Retail Media Market Outlook 2026,” February 2026.
Retail media’s growth story extends well beyond the United States, with WARC and WPP Media estimating global retail media ad spend reached $174.9 billion in 2025, growing 13.7% year-over-year, and forecasting a further 12.4% rise to $196.7 billion in 2026. This puts retail media on track to represent roughly 16% of all global advertising spend this year, a share significant enough that WARC projects the category will overtake combined global linear television and connected TV ad spend for the first time in 2026, a genuinely historic crossover point for an advertising category that barely existed in its current form a decade ago.
Amazon’s dominance is not confined to the American market either: in the United Kingdom, Amazon is estimated to capture roughly 73% of all retail media spend, a concentration level comparable to, though somewhat lower than, its US position. Some US-specific estimates place Amazon and Walmart’s combined share as high as 84% of the domestic market, reinforcing that regardless of which specific figure analysts settle on, the underlying structural reality, a small handful of dominant retail platforms capturing the overwhelming majority of retail media advertiser spend worldwide, remains remarkably consistent across every market examined.
Off-Site Retail Media: Social and Connected TV Growth
US Off-Site Retail Media Ad Spend, 2026 ($ Billions)
Retail-Media-Powered Social Ads █████████████████████████ $7.76B
Retail-Media-Powered CTV Spots ████████████████████░░░░░░░░ $6.10B
| Off-Site Retail Media Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Retail-media-powered social ad spend, US, 2026 | $7.76 billion |
| Retail-media-powered connected TV spend, US, 2026 | $6.10 billion |
| Combined off-site formats, US, 2026 | ~$13.86 billion |
| Driver of off-site growth | Amazon’s DSP and Walmart’s ad partnerships |
| Search’s share of retail media (on- and off-site) | Growing on both fronts |
| Display’s growth pattern | Continuing to migrate off-site |
Source: eMarketer, cited in DigitalApplied, “Retail Media vs In-House Ad Spend: 2026 Decision Matrix,” June 2026.
While sponsored product listings on a retailer’s own website remain the traditional core of retail media, off-site formats, ads that use retailer first-party data to target consumers on external platforms like social networks and streaming television, have emerged as one of the category’s fastest-growing subsegments. eMarketer projects retail-media-powered social ad spend will reach $7.76 billion in the US in 2026, while retail-media-powered connected TV spots will add a further $6.10 billion, together representing nearly $14 billion in advertising that extends retail media’s first-party targeting advantages well beyond a retailer’s own digital storefront.
This off-site expansion is being driven substantially by Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) and Walmart’s expanding advertising partnerships, both of which allow brands to apply retailer shopper data to ad placements running on entirely separate media properties, from social feeds to streaming services. This structural shift means retail media is no longer confined to the moment a shopper is actively browsing a retailer’s app or website, but increasingly follows that same shopper’s first-party purchase and browsing signals across the broader media ecosystem, a targeting capability that has become especially valuable to advertisers navigating the post-cookie advertising landscape.
Measurement and Incrementality Challenges in Retail Media
| Measurement Challenge Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Advertisers citing incrementality as their biggest measurement challenge | 75% |
| Advertisers feeling very/extremely effective at measuring incrementality | 15% |
| Primary attribution model used by most networks | Last-click, short-window attribution |
| Example attribution window variance | 7-day view-through vs. same-day click-only |
| Distinct retail media networks operating globally (Nov. 2025) | 277+ |
| Study source | Skai and Stratably, “2026 State of Retail Media Measurement and Incrementality” |
Source: Skai and Stratably, “2026 State of Retail Media Measurement and Incrementality” study, cited in Improvado, “Top 15 Retail Media Networks 2026,” 2026.
Despite retail media’s explosive growth, measurement remains the category’s most significant unresolved challenge. A 2026 study by Skai and Stratably found that 75% of advertisers cite incrementality, distinguishing genuinely incremental sales from baseline sales that would have occurred regardless of advertising, as their single biggest measurement obstacle, yet only 15% feel very or extremely effective at actually measuring it. This gap between the scale of the challenge and advertisers’ confidence in addressing it represents one of the clearest signs that retail media’s rapid commercial growth has outpaced the measurement infrastructure needed to fully justify that spending with rigorous, standardized methodology.
Much of this difficulty stems from inconsistent attribution practices across the industry’s 277-plus retail media networks, most of which still rely on last-click, short-window attribution models that can obscure genuine cross-channel impact. The specific attribution windows used vary dramatically from network to network, with one platform using a 7-day view-through window while another relies on a same-day, click-only model, making direct return-on-ad-spend comparisons across networks genuinely unreliable without careful normalization. For brands and agencies allocating growing budgets toward retail media, this measurement fragmentation means that simply comparing headline ROAS figures reported by different networks can produce dangerously misleading conclusions, reinforcing why standardized, third-party incrementality testing is increasingly viewed as an essential, rather than optional, investment for any advertiser scaling retail media spend meaningfully in 2026, a measurement discipline closely related to the broader attribution and ROI challenges tracked in our AI Marketing Budget Statistics coverage of how enterprise marketing leaders are working to prove the value of their growing technology investments.
Disclaimer: The data research report we present here is based on information found from various sources. We are not liable for any financial loss, errors, or damages of any kind that may result from the use of the information herein. We acknowledge that though we try to report accurately, we cannot verify the absolute facts of everything that has been represented.
