Amazon Prime Video to introduce more ads from next year

Amazon is adding even more ads to Prime Video, according to reporting by Financial Times. This uptick in corporate-sponsored splendor will go into effect early next year.

This comes less than a year after Amazon forced ads onto its streaming video platform, which is something all of the major streamers do now. We pay money to watch ads. It’s pretty darn cool. In any event, it remains unclear as to how many more ads will infest that next episode of Reacher or where they’ll be placed. Modern streaming shows aren’t made with advertisements in mind, so these ads just kinda pop up wherever.

Ads have turned into a serious revenue stream for Amazon because, again, they sit on top of our monthly Prime memberships that we already pay for. It costs extra to go ad-free. The company recently crowed that it drew more than $1.8 billion in advertising commitments at an upfront event in September. This exceeded the company’s own targets. Amazon also revealed that the ad tier of Prime Video reaches 19 million monthly users in the UK alone. This tier is used by over 100 million people in the US each month.

Kelly Day, vice-president of Prime Video International, told Financial Timesthat the platform launched with “a very light load” of ads at first, so as to prepare consumers for the coming onslaught. She said the initial rollout was a deliberate “gentle entry into advertising.”

“We know it was a bit of a contrarian approach to take,” she said. “But it’s actually gone much better than we even anticipated.” Day added that the company has not seen “a groundswell of people churning out or canceling” after it brought in advertisements. A rep from Amazon reached out to Engadget and said the company has not “changed our plans to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers”, despite today’s news.

By Engadget

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