Amazon Prime Video gets ads

The internet giant’s streaming service, Amazon Prime, will start to include advertising from early 2024 across select markets in the US and Europe, as the company seeks to monetise its audience beyond its membership fee. 

Amazon announced the changes in a blog post, explaining the move as a way to sustain investment in content and noting its “aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers”. 

The rollout will begin in the US, UK, Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. 

Why Amazon Prime Video ads matter

This isn’t entirely new territory for Amazon: advertising has taken a TV-esque form in its NFL Thursday Night Football broadcasts in the US and across its football and rugby coverage in the UK. In addition, its Freevee service (FKA IMDb TV) is already an ad-supported video-on-demand service. 

The complication, of course, is that viewers of Amazon Prime Video are already paying a fee, though they will have the option of paying a bit more to have no advertising. However, given that the core benefit of membership is the fast shipping, it’s likely that inertia will keep most subscribers with the service. 

It is a large and significant opportunity, with Amazon Prime’s more than 200m members now addressable through the one-stop retail shop of brand-led creative video advertising, right through to the point of purchase. 

In context

From a more or less standing start at the end of the last decade, Amazon has established itself among the ‘big five’ advertising firms. In its specialist area of retail media, Amazon is expected to take a global share of 37.2% of all spend, according to WARC forecasts. 

For Amazon, this has manifested as a consistent area of extreme growth during its conversations with investors. 

• While most of the growth in Amazon’s advertising business comes from performance, studies are beginning to suggest that the company’s advertising is capable of helping brands’ sales beyond Amazon.
• The will to spend on Amazon advertising is clearly high, but recent research from Tracksuit and WARC indicate that awareness scores remain vital to brands looking to perform on Amazon – effectively, performance is not enough.

Sourced from Amazon, WARC

[Image: Amazon]