Amazon Ramps Up Enshittification With Even More Ads On Prime Video
from the more-money-for-a-shittier-product dept
Back in early 2024 Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.
When originally announced, Amazon promised it would try to keep the ad load to three-and-a-half minutes per hour to try and be less annoying than its competitors. But the march toward enshittification yields to no one; 18 months later and Amazon has already doubled that volume of advertisements per hour:
“According to six ad buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK, the current ad load on Prime Video now ranges from four to six minutes per hour. And while that could bring down CPMs, buyers will be watching whether this impacts user experience.”
In the modern era it’s simply not allowed for a public company to offer people an affordable product everyone really likes. The unyielding pressures for quarterly growth at any cost inevitably result in the cannibalization and enshittification of most of your favorite products. It’s obvious everywhere; but particularly in newer industries (like say, video streaming) that were disruptive just a few years earlier.
Amazon has told eager investors but hasn’t bothered to communicate the latest enshittifcation to consumers yet. When asked for comment by Adweek, Amazon offered a redundant lie about how total ad load isn’t increasing (it is) and if it was it would be okay because Amazon is focused on “improving ad experiences”:
“Our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown,” said an Amazon Ads spokesperson. “While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown.”
As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have relegated to seeking old ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like the lax treatment of things like password sharing.
The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the brand begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”
It’s purely extractive and utterly pathological. Consumer interest, employee welfare, and the long term integrity or quality of the brand or product simply have nothing to do with it.
In this case, streaming companies are going to keep pushing their luck until piracy sees a massive resurgence (which is already starting to happen), at which point the executives will blame everyone and everything but themselves. Instead of any sort of self-awareness of the doom cycle they participate in, they’ll do something even more harmful: like lobbying Congress to make VPNs illegal.
Filed Under: ad load, advertisements, amazon prime, competition, consumers, enshittification, streaming, tv, video
Companies: amazon
Comments on “Amazon Ramps Up Enshittification With Even More Ads On Prime Video”
So they’re going to stop showing ads?
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Hold on, they didn’t say they were gonna do that—just that they’re “committed to” doing it, whatever that means; it’s certainly not a guarantee you can collect on.
And, of course, they didn’t say it would be an improvement for the viewers. Maybe they’ll “improve ad experiences” for the advertisers, but I suspect the real improvements be for their own employee-bonuses and for Jeff Bezos’s pocketbook (which may imply accidental short-term benefits to minor shareholders, too).
Thank God! I sure was getting bored of watching shows without ads!
Giving up Amazon Prime turned out to be much easier and painless than I expected, and that was before they started enshittifying in earnest. Amazon in general turns out to be ridiculously easy to walk away from. I highly recommend doing so.
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Not really a lie
This is not a lie, just your standard marketing double-speak. It doesn’t say what Karl says it does. It never actually says ad load isn’t increasing, or won’t be increasing. Rather, it avoids the question entirely, and answers an unasked question about their “commitment” instead.
Even their “commitment” is compatible with increasing the number of ads shown, as long as they’re not “simply” doing that. “Improving ad experiences” (for whom?) could include increasing the number of ads. That’s not “simply increasing the number”; it’s increasing the number, combined with doing some other stuff.
People have been complaining about the enshittification of Amazon’s shopping site for about a decade now, to no avail. Apparently, counterfeit products are a big concern. I don’t shop there, but I do come across Amazon links from search engines sometimes, and it’s astounding how often (for the last year or two) I’ve seen errors about something failing on Amazon’s end, and asking me to try again. When it does work, even if the search has a brand name, the screen’s often full of other brands instead, and I have to scroll to find whatever the search was for. And most reviews aren’t without logging in now.
The thing to remember about Amazon Prime is that most of its customers probably never subscribed because of the streaming. They subscribed for the free shipping, and maybe at some point started watching the video service because it was bundled. If Amazon can get them to not watch the video service, but to stay subscribed, that’s the ideal outcome.
At this point, we might as well see a race to see who's the worse
Youtube already have dominated the news about war against adblocking, copied Hulu’s pause ads on TV and mobile app, and introduced double non-skip ads.
Re: Not at all the same.
Amazon charges you AND serves you ads. If you pay for YouTube Premium you don’t see ANY ads (other than sponsors content within the video, if the content creator does that). BIG difference there.
You can charge me a subscription or you can advertise to me, you can’t do both!
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You’re just one person, and evidence suggests this is not a widespread view. Newspapers and magazines generally did both, plus abused people’s personal data by selling it to postal spammers.
(While dead media may not be a great example, that’s not the reason it died.)
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Pkease tell that to satellite and cable TV providers, because they’ve always done both. That’s why I’ve never had a subscription for Sky.
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They haven’t. I had cable TV (via older relatives) in the 1980s and 1990s, and don’t recall the provider advertising except on the TV guide channel (and maybe the bills, and radio and TV stations). The main ads anyone saw were from the broadcast channels that the cable provider was being paid to relay. What were they gonna do, black those out?
Eventually, cable-only networks did appear, some of which had advertising. That sucked, but, again, it was done by the channel providers, not the cable providers.
A lot of people, by the way, have been telling satellite and cable TV providers to take a hike. Techdirt’s written about “cord-cutting” many times—but, at this point, I think it’s kind of done, and subscriber counts are going down more due to death than cancellation per se. (If you haven’t watched live television in a while, you may not have noticed that the ads have become targeted to old people—hearing aids, motor-reclining chairs, etc.)
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I see you have no experience of Sky or Virgin Media in the UK and the former company’s illegal nine-minute-long ad breaks (supposed to be nine minutes per hour, not per ad break), which they have despite also charging fees. Remember: just because you haven’t personally experienced something doesn’t mean it’s never happened, just like we don’t have masked individuals abducting foreign nationals off the streets here, but I don’t believe that’s not happening in the US.
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Maybe not on YouTube, but are they still collecting viewing data and using it for ad targeting elsewhere?
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Fuck Hulu. – 🇨🇦
“Our commitment is to improving ad experiences
Translation: “Our commitment is to ramp up our spying and data mining even more, so as to present viewers with advertisements for items, for example, that they’ve talked about in the presence of an Amazon Echo”
Every thing you want to watch on it costs extra. What are you even paying for?
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Generally, people are buying it for the free and faster shipping. Sure, Amazon touts other benefits such as video, but it’s best for them if people don’t use any of that. Preferably not even the shipping benefits (there are ways to get them for free without Prime, and if a subscriber falls into such patterns by accident, their Prime subscription is just free revenue for Amazon).
Last I checked uBlock Origin worked on Prime Video ads, but it’s been a little while since I watched Prime Video.
In biology, unchecked constant growth is known as cancer.
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And if capitalism is not brought under control, it will go on to drive humanity right to extinction.
I wouldn’t mind the commercials if they were more relevant to my interests. Yes, I know people find relevant ads to be creepy and intrusive, but my point is that Amazon already collects so much data about my shopping habits that I shouldn’t see the same drug ads that I see on regular TV.
I stopped watching CBS This Morning because it became drug ads interrupted by a news segment.
If I were advertisers, I’d be more picky about the data that the streaming services provide. Do people interact with the ads, such as scanning the QR code, or ignoring it?
Or is the bottom line that it’s cheaper for companies to run ads on Amazon than on CBS?
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I don’t know what’s cheaper, but I think the bottom line is that advertising companies are able to convince their clients that, whatever it is that the ad company is doing, it’s working. I mean, their business is basically to sell people stuff they don’t need; that doesn’t just apply to the ad viewers.
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Or if they weren’t the same damn 2 commercials over and over again?
or even just reading a book
Streaming was only ever of value when it was more convenient than piracy. That is no longer the case.
Amazon Ad Free... Isn't.
It is worse. I paid for ad free, but it has suddenly gone away. Bye Amazon
i must be spoiled
i got’s me one of them raspberry pi’s. it’s nicely loaded with ad blockers! so the likes of prime and you tube can fuck right off! 100% add free! well almost….some video’s have sponsored ads presented by the channel host/ maker. but that can be skipped through.
I think it's also time to do a deep dive on YouTube Premium
YouTube Premium has rapidly increased in cost over the few couple of years.
All the content is freely produced by content creators – nothing is paid for directly upfront any more as far as I know.
The content creators are constantly complaining about the lack of revenue.
Alphabet keeps promising “improvements” for the increasing price. But as a user I struggle to think of a single improvement, let alone one that benefits me.
There are heaps of features I’d love to see but there is no process for users to offer feedback, the only feedback is from content creators and advertisers.
If the price increases don’t benefit me or the content creators , that leave one last beneficiary of the price hikes…
Over the years I have successfully “voted with my wallet” away from so many services but YouTube really feels like a monopoly – I paid for Pandora for a year but its just too small and found myself just going back to YT. I think only an antitrust action can save the users from Alphabets unbridled greed.