Almost a year and a half after Amazon started showing ads on its Prime Video streaming service, a new report says the company has doubled the amount of ad time included when users are watching TV shows and movies.
According to documents seen by AdWeek, Prime Video can now show between four to six minutes of ads per every hour watched. When Prime Video first started including ads in January 2024, it said it would keep them between two to three and a half minutes per hour.
Amazon didn’t confirm the change to AdWeek, but it gave an overall statement on its ad strategy. “Our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown.”
The company has reportedly told advertisers that it is intentionally increasing ad space on Prime Video. In an email from Amazon to a potential advertiser, seen by AdWeek, an Amazon representative said, “Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour.”
The brand said in late 2024 it planned to increase the ads at some point in 2025. It’s unclear if Amazon will continue to increase ad time further than six minutes per hour watched.
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Prime Video offers an ad-free service for an extra $2.99 a month. That’s on top of $14.99 a month for the full Amazon Prime service, which includes next-day delivery and other benefits, or $8.99 a month to access the company’s streaming service. That extra cost to go ad-free hasn’t changed since launch, but if the brand is increasing the amount of ads, it may be we’ll see that price go up in the future.
Previously, Prime Video has shown ads at the start of movies and then roughly around 20 minutes into the title with a message that says the film will continue “uninterrupted” after one ad break. In PCMag’s testing, that continues to be the case, although our experiment was on a UK-based account. We found new titles like The Accountant 2 and older titles on the service, such as The Zone of Interest, continued to play two minutes of ads at the start, followed by a two to three minute ad break around 20 to 30 minutes into the film.
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