As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is looking into multiple methods of increasing its revenue from advertisement across the business, and that includes Prime Video, which could have its tiering system changed to introduce an ad-supported tier.
Given Amazon's prominent position in the digital advertisement space sitting third behind Google and Meta in terms of revenue in the United States, advertisers are keen for Amazon to make this move. This would follow in the footsteps of Netflix bringing in an ad-supported tier at a lower price point than the standard subscription
Advertisers are most interested in having access to premium films and programs on the service, which have until now remained mostly ad-free. With the amount of interest that these shows and films can generate, being able to have advertisements on them would potentially be very profitable for the advertisers and by extension, Amazon.
At the moment, Prime Video is available with the standard Amazon Prime membership or as an $8.99 a month standalone. subscription. It doeshave some ad-supported coverage already with some of its live sports coverage and product placement within shows on the platform, as well as content from Freevee which is Amazon's free ad-supported video service.
One of the routes that Amazon is said to be considering is introducing the ads into the existing tier of Prime Video membership, and offering a higher tier which would then include the benefit of being ad-free, which would follow a similar path to Amazon Music where it gave Prime members more songs but removed the ability to get most of them on demand.
Amazon is very keen to expand its content library on Prime Video to compete with the large array of competitors in the space now, through bidding for rights for NFL games and having more original shows. This would be one way that it could pay for the cost of bringing more content to the service.
Source: WSJ
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