Amazon’s been able to sell books, CDs, Kindles, and groceries.  Its cloud services have proven popular, too.  And soon, for the sake of making even more money, one analyst thinks Amazon will branch into online display advertising.

Ryan Kim obtained a research note written by Ben Schachter of Macquerie Research, and it seems Schachter’s noticed some interesting things.  Kim wrote, “Looking at recent job listings, Schachter concludes that Amazon is likely planning to use its consumer data and new ad targeting experience to raise eCPMs for online display ads both on its own site and on third-party sites.”

Then Kim continued, “The retail giant is likely to create a sophisticated system delivering targeted performance-based display ads that incorporate affiliate advertising and real-time bidding, Schachter said.  He thinks there’s no reason why Amazon can’t emerge as a competitor to existing players such as Google and Yahoo.”

On the “pro” side: Amazon’s a household name.  The company boasts impressive technical capabilities.  Plus, it’s got a market cap of about $83 billion, meaning it has the money to hire or buy just about anything it wants.

Of course, on the “con” side, we can effectively start and finish the list just by naming Google.  The search giant’s built its empire on advertising (its current market cap is close to $186 billion, by the way), most marketers are satisfied with the way things work, and no company’s been able to pose much of a threat for years.

It should be interesting to see what happens.