Amazon.com's plans for world domination hit a slight bump on Tuesday. For years, the retailer has been telling Wall Street to ignore how little money it was making and focus instead on the fact that it was bringing in more and more customers and keeping them so happy they never went anywhere else for anything. In Amazon's fourth-quarter results, however, investors finally glimpsed off in the distance that growth beginning to flatten. Its revenue rose to $17.43 billion, up 35 percent. Most retailers would die happy with such a jump. But for the e-commerce leader, sales were nearly a billion dollars short of what analysts had been expecting. Even as investors are panting for Facebook's public stock offering, established Internet stars are disappointing. Amazon's poor showing came on the heels of a similar miss from Google. Among the reasons for Amazon's missed expectations: Video games were lackluster. There were supply issues from flooding in Thailand. And maybe there was a bit of backlash. In December, Amazon.com created an uproar by encouraging customers to use a price-checking app on Main Street and in the malls, and then return to Amazon for a better deal. Booksellers, who have long felt themselves in the retailer's cross hairs, were particularly offended. Shares of Amazon, which rose $2.29 to $194.44 on Tuesday, immediately slumped in after-hours trading by $18. "With the valuation Amazon is carrying, you got to perform," said Colin Gillis, senior technology analyst for BGC Financial. You've got to be like Apple - smash through the numbers people are afraid even to whisper. Instead, they're only making slightly over a penny on every dollar in revenue. That's pathetic in any industry. Other analysts were more optimistic. "The long-term story is very much intact," said Scott Devitt of Morgan Stanley, although he noted that investors might not be buying the stock for the next six months or so. But they knew what the answer was, which was that Amazon was not going to tell them. "We were very pleased with the great growth we had," said Tom Szkutak, Amazon's chief financial officer, in a conference call. The only data Amazon would share about Kindles is that their sales were up 177 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010. "That seems like a healthy business," Mr. Devitt said. If sales were weaker than expected, profits were higher than forecast. Net income decreased 58 percent to $177 million in the fourth quarter, or 38 cents a share, compared with $416 million, or 91 cents a share, in the year-earlier period. The company said earlier that it might lose money during the quarter, traditionally the best part of the year for any retailer. Amazon has been in the enviable position of growing much faster than the industry itself. But all that meteoric growth, stoked by selling goods as cheaply as possible and then shipping them either for a pittance or free, does not leave much room for profit. Its margins declined for four quarters before rebounding in the fourth quarter. Ever since its founding in 1994, Amazon has built for the future. For a company often thought of as virtual, with its e-books and vibrant cloud computing service, Amazon is increasingly rooted in the real world. Nomura Securities estimated this week that Amazon would add the rough equivalent of 450 Costco stores from 2011 to 2016. "E-commerce is a long secular growth story," Brian Nowak, a Nomura analyst, said in the report. Analysts have been estimating that Amazon sold as many as six million Fires plus millions more traditional Kindles.