by Dan Moren
Shocked—shocked!—to find that Amazon is putting ads in Prime Video
Our friend and colleague Joe Rosensteel has perhaps one of the best perspectives on the “Amazon Prime is adding ads” story:
Then investors wanted profit, not growth — The Netflix Correction — now it’s about generating money. So Prime Video, which was run as some “do whatever” business that basically amounted to brand advertising, and did weird stuff like buy MGM for way more than The Rings of Power and Citadel cost, now has to turn a profit.
Ads, ads as far as the eye can see.
More to the point, as Joe says, Prime is largely about the shipping benefit, with everything else as ancillary point. I know that when my wife and I were auditing our streaming subscriptions the other week, Prime was one of the ones that will basically never get cut, because free two-day delivery saves us money in the long run.1
- Apple One is also currently in that department, because of Apple Music and iCloud predominantly, but I can see a path to going à la carte there—not an option with Prime really. ↩