The soft, cherubic voices of corporate executives singing in unison can only mean one thing: they’ve found a new way to extract money from our eyeballs. Amazon is increasing the number of ads on Prime Video, as reported by Financial Times, which will take effect early next year. This move follows the introduction of forced ads on the streaming platform less than a year ago. Ads have become a major revenue stream for Amazon, sitting on top of our monthly Prime memberships. The company boasted drawing over $1.8 billion in advertising commitments at an event in September and revealed that the ad tier of Prime Video reaches millions of users in the UK and US. Kelly Day of Prime Video International mentioned that the platform started with a light load of ads at first to ease users into the ad experience, which has been received better than anticipated. Additionally, Amazon is working on an interactive ad experience that will allow viewers to add items to their cart directly from the video stream.
