Amazon will be offering more Prime Video ad slots to advertisers next year as the company “ramps up” its ad load “a little bit more.”
In January, when Amazon launched Prime Video's ad tier, subscribers would see two to three-and-a-half minutes of ads per hour (which is increasing), and never in the middle of content (which is changing).
Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International told the Financial Times, that upon launch, Prime Video with ads was given a “very light ad load,” providing subscribers with a “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers' expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like.”
Day later told Ars Technica, “We have not changed our plans to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers and evaluate advertising volumes to help ensure we’re delivering a great customer experience.”
“Meaningfully few ads” — that's not exactly setting the bar too high when comparing yourself to TV. Amazon Video could have half as many ads as traditional TV, and it'd still be too many!
It's also been confirmed that Amazon will be adding shoppable ads to Prime Video next year, which will include carousel ads, pause ads, and brand trivia ads.
Amazon says that Prime Video has 200M monthly viewers and that subscriber count hasn't dropped significantly since it added ads. I guess now Amazon will look to see just how far it can push viewers with ads before they either cancel or upgrade to an ad-free experience (which I'm confident will also go up in price next year).