Amazon has built its own “real-time bidding platform,” Ad Week says, meaning it has developed software to analyze your Amazon shopping patterns and then follow you around the web to non-Amazon sites with targeted ads – all in the blink of an eye. Better still for Amazon, it can make additional money acting as a middleman for other advertisers who want to use this technology, especially the companies that make products sold through Amazon.

It was already known that Amazon was dabbling in this field; as we reported in October, Amazon began offering real-time bidding to other advertisers earlier this year, contributing to the company’s estimated 2012 ad revenue of $500 million to $1 billion