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Almost a year and a half after Amazon started showing ads on Prime Video, a new report says the company has doubled the number of commercials viewers will see on the streaming service.
According to documents seen by AdWeek, Prime Video will now show four to six minutes of ads for each hour watched, up from two to 3.5 minutes per hour in 2024.
Amazon didn’t confirm the change to AdWeek, saying only that it's focused on "improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown."
However, the company has reportedly told advertisers that it has more Prime Video ad space up for grabs. "Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour," Amazon wrote in an email to a potential advertiser, AdWeek reports.
In late 2024, Amazon acknowledged that it would increase the number of ads at some point this year. The only way to get rid of them is to pay an extra $2.99 a month. That’s on top of the cost of an Amazon Prime membership or the $8.99 Amazon charges for standalone Prime Video.
That extra cost to go ad-free hasn't changed since launch, but if Amazon secures lots of ad dollars, it might encourage a price hike. The cost of the ad-supported version of Netflix, for example, has remained steady while the ad-free versions have seen several price increases.
Previously, Prime Video showed 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.