Amazon Ratchets Up Enshittifying Prime Video After Public Shrugs At Initial Ads
In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone’s favorite thing about television: advertisements! And, because big platforms like Amazon don’t so much see subscribers as customers so much as hostages, along with the introduction of ads came a subscription tier to avoid them. The point is that Amazon, a top five company by market cap in the world, needs more money. Or, in lieu of that, they need the company’s stock price to rise quarter by quarter in order to satiate those infamous “brunchlords” Karl Bode is always talking about.
When this is the mindset of a company, of course, enshittification will never be a one-step process. The enshittifiers must keep going, incrementally seeing how they can further extract any volume of dollars from its own customers to satisfy the masters. Which is how we get to today’s news, roughly 8 months after Amazon introduced ads into Prime Video, with Prime Video’s next great innovation: moar ads!!!
Speaking to the Financial Times today, Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, said that Amazon will offer more Prime Video ad slots to advertisers next year. She didn’t get into specifics but confirmed that Prime Video’s ad load would “ramp up a little bit more into 2025.”
In January, when Amazon launched Prime Video’s ad tier, The Wall Street Journal reported that subscribers would see an average of between two and three-and-a-half minutes of ads per hour. Day told FT today that upon launch, Prime Video with ads was given a “very light ad load,” providing subscribers with a “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers’ expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like.” The executive pointed out that Prime Video with ads doesn’t show commercials in the middle of content. That could change next year.
Amazon is also adding shoppable ads to Prime Video in 2025, FT confirmed. The new ad format, which includes carousel ads, pause ads, and brand trivia ads—is being sold to advertisers as a new way to attract TV and movie viewing audiences that have become more elusive in the streaming age.
Yes, yes, of course! The best way to make sure that Prime Video remains attractive to customers, thereby making it lucrative for Amazon, is obviously to have greater ad time in content, to inject ads into the middle of content, and to try to make those ads as annoying as possible! Why, this hasn’t been tried since — checks notes –, well, since cable television did the exact same thing! Never mind that people went to streaming in part because they hated this very thing about cable television. Never mind that this new program comes with absolutely zero benefit to the subscriber. And certainly never-the-fuck-mind that you’re going out of your way to talk about how the customer is the frog you’re gently raising the temperature on the pot of water. Yes, this is obviously brilliant.
Now, why is Amazon doing this? Because the frog didn’t complain about the temperature of the water, apparently.
Amazon says Prime Video has 200 million monthly viewers and that subscriber count hasn’t dropped dramatically since it added ads. Similarly, market research firm Antenna told FT in July that a substantial amount of Prime Video subscribers opted out of ads initially, but that number soon “trailed off.” By May, fewer than a 10th of subscribers were paying for an ad-free subscription, Antenna said.
According to Day, subscriber churn in response to the ads has “been much, much less than we anticipated.”
Read that last bit again. Amazon expected all of you to be more pissed off than you were. When you weren’t, they’ve decided to jam even more ads down your slack-jawed, pacified throats. In other words, this reads for all the world like Amazon will not be satisfied until it finds the exact line its customers will draw in the sand.
Thing is, though, by the time Prime Video pisses off a good chunk of its fans, it might be too late to pull back from the brink. And if you think that could never happen, so did cable television.