Amazon Adds Ads to Prime Video

Amazon Prime Video—one of the last major streaming services without commercial breaks—will soon have TV advertising.

Fans of flagship series like Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or The Boys will soon see “limited advertisements” in Prime Video programming, the company announced this morning.

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” Amazon said in a statement.

Though the company didn’t give specific ad loads, the lowest benchmark for ad time on a streaming platform is around four minutes per hour. Commercials will arrive in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada in early 2024, with other countries later in the year.

Prime Video currently costs $14.99 per month (and is also included in the $139 yearly Prime subscription). An ad-free tier will be available for an additional $2.99 per month.

Live events and sports will continue to have ads.

Joining the ranks

Prime Video was one of the last major ad-free holdouts in the streaming world, with only Apple TV+ remaining commercial-free.

Adding an ad tier follows the moves of rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max as streaming services continue to search for additional revenue.

According to Amazon, advertising will help it “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

The company’s content spend rocketed up 30% to $16.6 billion in 2022, which includes Thursday Night Football and original series like Rings of Power. The first season of the Lord of the Rings series cost more than $500 million, and TNF rights come in at more than $1 billion annually.

And while Amazon said it would not be making price changes to Prime in 2024, multiple other streaming services have already hiked their rates.

Last month, Disney raised its streaming prices for the second time in less than a year, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock got pricier for the first time ever in July.

Familiar territory

Amazon isn’t new to advertising.

During the company’s NewFronts presentation in May, Amazon said that Prime Video has become the most-subscribed-to streaming service in the U.S. and that advertisers can reach an average monthly U.S. audience of 155 million across Amazon ad-supported streaming TV. That includes Amazon Freevee, Thursday Night Football, Twitch, Fire TV and third-party apps via Amazon Publisher Direct.

However, as recently as June, a source familiar with the matter told Adweek that a WSJ report “surprised” Amazon and that the company would let media buyers know an ad tier was coming before that knowledge was made public.

Multiple buyers told Adweek at the time that Amazon had not contacted them about a potential ad tier.