More ads are coming to Amazon Prime Video

Can you hear the gentle, angelic voices of company leaders singing in unison? That can only mean one thing. They've found a new way to keep our money out of our sight. According to a report from Amazon, Amazon Prime Video is adding even more ads Financial Times. This surge in corporate-sponsored splendor will come into effect early next year.

This comes less than a year after Amazon forced advertising on its streaming video platform, something all major streamers now do. We pay money to watch advertisements. It's damn cool. In any case, it remains unclear how many more ads will plague the next episode of Reacher or where they will be placed. Modern streaming shows are not designed for advertising, so these ads just pop up everywhere.

Ads have become a serious source of revenue for Amazon because, again, they are on top of our monthly Prime memberships that we already pay for. It costs extra to be ad-free. The company recently announced that it had received more than $1.8 billion in endorsements at a preview event in September. This means that our own goals were exceeded. Amazon also announced that Prime Video's ad tier reaches 19 million monthly users in the UK alone. This tier is used by over 100 million people in the US every month.

Kelly Day, vice president of Prime Video International, said Financial Times that the platform initially launched with “a very small amount” of ads to prepare consumers for the coming onslaught. She said the initial launch was a deliberate “soft entry into advertising”.

“We know it was a bit of a contrarian approach,” she said. “But it actually went a lot better than we expected.” Day added that the company didn’t see a “boom in waves of churn or cancellation” after running ads.

The company is also preparing an interactive advertising experience that will allow Prime Video viewers to add an item to their shopping cart directly from the video stream. This works with physical remote controls and in the app. Sweet, sweet corporate synergies. Yay!