Report: Amazon Nearly Doubled the Ad Load on Prime Video

Amazon has quietly dialed up the ad load on Prime Video after introducing “limited advertisements” on the platform back in January 2024. It currently costs Prime Video subscribers an extra $2.99/month to remove those ads, which may now even appear when they hit the pause button while they’re watching a show.

A new report from Adweek citing six ad buyers and internal documents reveals that Prime Video now shows four to six minutes of ads per hour. That’s up from two to three-and-a-half minutes per hour when ads were introduced on the platform last year.

Back in October, the company hinted that it would increase the number of ad slots on Prime Video shows and movies in 2025. In an interview with the Financial Times, Kelly Day, vice-president of Prime Video International, said that churn had “been much, much less than we anticipated” since the platform started showing ads to paid subscribers. “We haven’t really seen a groundswell of people churning out or cancelling,” the exec said.

“Our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown,” an Amazon Ads spokesperson told Adweek. “While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown.”

Last month, Amazon said (https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/ai-pause-format-prime-video?ref_=a20m_us_evnts_uf25_lbr_nws_aipause) that Prime Video now has an average monthly ad-supported reach of over 130 million U.S. customers, adding that an average of 88% of Prime Video viewers in the country had shopped on Amazon. To capitalize on this massive audience, the company plans to launch AI-generated ads on Prime Video this year that “feel like natural extensions of what viewers are watching.”