Amazon Will Soon Show More Ads on Prime Video

Amazon announced this week that it will soon start showing more ads to Prime Video users who don’t pay extra to get an ad-free experience. Earlier this year, the company made its existing service ad-supported and gave its 200 million monthly viewers the choice to pay $2.99/month to get rid of ads. Starting next year, the default ad-supported experience is going to get worse for Prime Video users.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Kelly Day, vice-president of Prime Video International, looked back at what she sees as “a “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like”. The exec said that Amazon purposely went for a “very light ad load” at the beginning, adding that the churn rate has “been much, much less than we anticipated . . . we haven’t really seen a groundswell of people churning out or cancelling.”

Anyway, Amazon is now planning to increase the number of ad slots on Prime Video shows and movies in 2025. The company is also introducing new shoppable ad formats, including Pause ads. Amazon being one of the biggest online retailers may help to make Prime Video ads more attractive for brands.

“We know it was a bit of a contrarian approach to take to things from us. But . . . it’s actually gone much better than we even anticipated,” the Prime Video exec said. However, Amazon asking paying customers to pay extra for the ad-free experience they previously had isn’t unprecedented: You may remember that an Amazon Prime Video subscription used to include ad-free viewing on Twitch, but Amazon removed that “Twitch Prime” benefit four years ago and made it exclusive to its separate Twitch Turbo subscription.

Anyway, Amazon previously explained that Prime Video ads would help the company to “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.” This week, Day told the Financial Times that Amazon has been investing more money on Prime Video content including live sports rights, live news coverage of the upcoming US election, and music shows.