It has been a month since Amazon announced one of the most controversial changes to its service: the arrival of ads to Prime Video. After the success of the cheap Netflix and Disney+ plans, the online shopping giant did not want to miss the opportunity to gain a foothold in this market and decided to add advertising to all users. To remove it, it gave the option of paying an extra, in addition to Amazon Prime, of 1.99 euros per month. But it seems that things are going to get worse.
Right now, Amazon shows one or two ads when users go to watch a video. This ad is shown at the beginning of playback, in addition to being able to exit again after a long period of pause or if we try to resume the series, or movie, another day. Depending on the content, ads may also appear while a chapter is playing, as if it were DTT, which is starting to get annoying.
But things seem like they’re going to get worse. And, just a month after the launch of these new ads, Amazon Prime is about to confirm the arrival of three new types of ads. Ads that, if you don’t pay the extra 1.99 euros more per month, you will have to swallow.
The new Amazon Prime Video ads
As we can read on various Internet sites, Amazon is preparing to show new advertising within its Prime Video:
- Carousel Ads. They are a type of ads that will appear in the usual ad breaks that are already active within the platform and through which we can scroll. If we interact, the ad will stop and we can, for example, add the product to the shopping cart. We will only be able to continue with the ad when we stop interacting with it.
- Pause ads. It will appear, as the name suggests, when the user pauses the content they are viewing. It will remain on the screen in translucent form with a message and images, and will disappear when the user continues watching the series, or movie, they were watching.
- Ads with questions. One of the most annoying. It will ask the user questions or tell anecdotes, offering certain “rewards.” The objective of this ad is for users to add them to the Amazon shopping cart.
As we can see, these new ads have two objectives. The first of them is to allow brands to advertise much more within the platform, being able to choose between different types of ads (each, of course, with a different price for the brand) so that the platform stands out from the others. And the second is, obviously, that the user ends up in the Amazon store, either for the product that has been advertised, or for any other related product.
When the new announcements take effect
At the moment we do not know when Amazon is scheduled to start showing these new ads to all users. What we do know is that the company is going to officially present them on May 14, so we still have 5 days to see it with the current advertising model.
Regarding the price, taking into account that Amazon just launched its ad-free subscription a month ago, it is not going to change. But what we can be clear about is that, sooner or later, it will end up going from those 1.99 euros (which is nothing more than an experiment) to what Amazon itself wants to charge based on what it earns from the ads.