Bad news for Amazon Prime Video viewers! More ads are on the way
Amazon apparently wants to milk Prime Video even further by showing more ads than ever before. According to Ars Technica, Amazon will test how much advertising it can get away with before Prime Video viewers revolt (or even cancel their subscriptions altogether).
Kelly Day, Amazon’s Vice President of Prime Video International, told the Financial Times in this paywalled article that Amazon will offer more Prime Video ad slots to advertisers in 2025.
Currently, it seems that Prime Video users see an average of 2 to 3.5 minutes of advertising per hour. Day told FT that standard Prime Video currently doesn’t show any ads in the middle of content. That could change come next year.
In a statement to Ars Technica, an Amazon spokesperson tried to gloss over the threat of “more” ads for Prime Video customers: “We have not changed our plans to have significantly fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers and to evaluate ad volume to ensure we deliver a great customer experience.”
The Financial Times also confirmed that Amazon would be adding “shoppable ads” to Prime Video in 2025, including carousel ads, intermission ads, and brand quiz ads. All of this ad space is meant to target a TV and cinema audience that’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach using traditional advertising methods.
Ads are invading Amazon Prime Video
Amazon increased the number of ads on Prime Video back in February 2024, with movies and TV shows getting two main types of ads: ones for Amazon’s own streaming content in the form of trailers, and one paid for by advertising partners (similar to regular TV commercials).
To add insult to injury, some features were silently removed from the standard Prime Video plan and locked behind a paid upgrade that reduces the number of ads for an extra $2.99 per month.
Amazon told Ars Technica that Prime Video has 200 million monthly viewers and that the number of subscribers has not fallen dramatically since the company added advertising. In May 2024, less than a tenth of Prime subscribers paid the extra charge for an ad-free subscription.
Given that, it’s no surprise that Amazon executives feel bold enough to push more ads on viewers. Not to mention the apparent success of Netflix’s ad-supported plan, showing that we haven’t yet reached the point where enough is enough. How much more can we afford and how many more ads can we stomach? We’ll have to wait and see.
Further reading: Oof, when did streaming get so expensive?