Amazon will be adding even more ads to Prime Video in the form of Pause Ads, designed solely to leverage your Prime subscription and sell you content. This comes after the online retail monolith has just been completed Force advertising to Prime Video subscribers unless they paid an additional $3 per month.
We already have start-of-show ads, but soon you’ll also see so-called pause ads, carousel ads, and trivia ads. If it’s not clear from the names, they all refer to Prime Shopping. As explained by The Hollywood ReporterThese pages allow users to add items to their shopping cart without leaving Prime Video. In particular, pause ads will be present whenever you pause your content with a transparent banner showing you products to add to your cart. Hulu has introduced pause ads in 2019. Now, YouTube does the same thing with his service.
Pause ads will be around all the time, but at least you can ignore them more easily than the carousel and quiz ads. Shoppable carousel ads run during regular Prime commercial breaks. Users can click through these products using the mouse or remote control if necessary. Trivia ads also run during breaks, asking users to answer a few questions, offer an explanation about a product, and share an add-to-cart option.
The announcement didn’t clearly explain when Prime subscribers will see these ads. Gizmodo has reached out to Amazon for comment and we will update the story when we hear back.
In case it wasn’t clear, the end goal is to finally integrate Amazon’s digital retail empire into its streaming service. Other services have tried offering QR codes that let you jump to a page on your phone, but now people watching ads on Prime not only have to deal with the subtle manipulation of sponsorship or advertising, but also the direct call to action to buy, buy, buy. The announced promotional offers come just days before Amazon’s big Upfront conference on May 14, which will attempt to sell advertisers on all the benefits of marketing their products and services on Amazon.
The real question now is whether Amazon will use its first-party data to offer targeted advertising on Prime Video. All signs point to yes. In the company’s announcement, Alan Moss, VP of Global Ad Sales at Amazon Ad, said the goal is to “transform streaming advertising through our differentiated combination of reach, first-party signals and advertising technology.” This mention of First-party signals is Amazon’s special predictive brand targeted advertising That does not matter Third party cookies.
In January, Amazon forced ads targeting Prime Video subscribers to anyone who already pays $15 a month for the video service alone or $139 a year for Prime. To not see ads, you would have to select a separate $3 per month surcharge. It’s been a few months of advertising and at this point it’s pretty clear that the advertising has undoubtedly made the service worse. There aren’t nearly as many ads on Prime Video as there are on streaming services like Hulu or even Netflix, but they still interrupt the viewing experience.
In some ways, Amazon isn’t really that different from other streaming platforms. Streaming prices have skyrocketed across the board, and the last time Amazon raised prices on its Prime subscription was back in 2022. Still, the way the retail giant has implemented its advertising offering feels worse than the way Netflix rolled out its cheaper streaming tier last year, even if it will soon Eliminate the Netflix Basic subscription tier. Amazon is is facing a possible class action lawsuit The company “deceived” the users of its unique ad-free streaming service.