Walmart’s U.S. advertising unit, Walmart Connect, grew revenue 30% year over year in the retailer’s fiscal Q2 2025, according to an earnings statement. The company’s global advertising business, which includes India-based Flipkart, was up 26% year-over-year. Walmart does not break out specific revenue figures for advertising but has disclosed the business generates billions annually.
Marketplace sellers, smaller and emerging brands that sell their wares through Walmart, were a boon to Connect during the period. Ad sales derived from the category climbed nearly 50%, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said on a call discussing the results with investors.
“Our newer businesses like marketplace, advertising, and membership, are also contributing, diversifying our profits and reinforcing the resilience of our business model,” McMillon said in a statement attached to the earnings.
Connect this year has worked on expanding the number of places where its advertising partners can buy media. In-store and offsite channels have been key priorities for the retail media network.
More ads have started appearing in self-checkout lane screens, TV aisles, sampling stations and over Walmart’s store radios as the retailer vies to better monetize its formidable brick-and-mortar footprint. In the offsite arena, Connect has struck deals with publishers like Disney to use its first-party shopper data to better target and measure ads on connected TV. Earlier this year, Walmart acquired the smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion, strengthening its muscles in the video advertising arena.
Walmart’s e-commerce business also grew at a healthy clip in Q2, which potentially boosted onsite advertising, or campaigns that run on properties Walmart owns. Walmart wields a wide lead among retail media networks when it comes to generating onsite advertising impressions, per third-party analysis. Global e-commerce sales, which are reported separately, were up 21% year-over-year, delivering an “outsized contribution” to the results, CFO John David Rainey said on the investor call.
The earnings report impressed Wall Street overall, beating sales estimates, while Walmart raised its outlook for the full year. U.S. comparable sales increased 4.2% while consolidated revenues were up 4.8% to $169.3 billion. Advertising and membership growth, taken together, accounted for over 50% of operating income growth for the quarter, according to Rainey.
“We’ve got to be really good at the core basics to have those work, but continue to be pleased with these faster-growing, higher-margin parts of our business that you all are seeing are changing the reflection in terms of how our financials look,” said Rainey.
