Amazon's Prime Video gets more advertising in 2025
Amazon wants to attract more major customers as advertising partners for its streaming service. They need more space, and they should get it.
(Image: Shutterstock.com; Diego Thomazini)
Since the beginning of 2024, in Germany since February 5 of this year, Amazon Prime Video has also been showing interstitial advertising in the basic subscription. This is part of a long-term strategy to expand the number of advertising spaces. Kelly Day, head of the service, has now confirmed this to the Financial Times. Day only moved from ViacomCBS to Amazon at the end of 2021. CBS, one of the major "networks" in the USA, has already had an extensive streaming offering there for ten years, from which "Paramount+", which is also available in Germany, emerged.
More advertising space in 2025
As Day told the newspaper on the fringes of an advertising industry conference in London, Prime Video wants to increasingly encourage major brands to collaborate. Up to now, advertising subscriptions in Germany have usually included commercials for Prime content or other Amazon offerings, which in the industry usually means that the advertising slots are not fully booked.
The campaigns of major brands that run in parallel on German TV channels are often not shown on Prime Video. Nevertheless, the number of advertising slots is to be increased in 2025, as Kelly Day confirmed to the Financial Times.
It is not clear from the report how this will be implemented in detail. The example of the successful US series with a running time of around 40 minutes shows that Amazon still has many opportunities to increase the number of advertising blocks or their duration.
Such formats usually have at least four slots for an advertising block, whereas in Germany Prime Video currently only uses three with one to three spots per slot. This could change with the new advertising initiative.
There were too few cancellations
Your company believes it can afford this because the approximately 200 million Prime Video customers around the world have not reacted as negatively to the change to the subscription as expected. The number of cancellations was "much, much lower than we estimated", said Kelly Day.
Day did not want to say how many customers had opted for the more expensive ad-free subscription, but it was less than the 20 percent reported by industry observers.
Whether the change to the subscription was legal in all countries remains legally disputed. However, it has been clear for some time that Amazon is serious about its strategy of advertising to as many customers as possible. Back in May 2024, the company announced that advertising would also be shown when playback was paused.
Interactive offers for direct shopping on Amazon from a stream, among other things, are also being considered. Prime Video's dominance in online retail gives it an advantage over competitors such as Netflix and Disney+, which is also likely to sell well to advertisers as multi-level marketing.
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