from the more-money-for-a-shittier-product dept
Back in early 2024 Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.
When originally announced, Amazon promised it would try to keep the ad load to three-and-a-half minutes per hour to try and be less annoying than its competitors. But the march toward enshittification yields to no one; 18 months later and Amazon has already doubled that volume of advertisements per hour:
“According to six ad buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK, the current ad load on Prime Video now ranges from four to six minutes per hour. And while that could bring down CPMs, buyers will be watching whether this impacts user experience.”
In the modern era it’s simply not allowed for a public company to offer people an affordable product everyone really likes. The unyielding pressures for quarterly growth at any cost inevitably result in the cannibalization and enshittification of most of your favorite products. It’s obvious everywhere; but particularly in newer industries (like say, video streaming) that were disruptive just a few years earlier.
Amazon has told eager investors but hasn’t bothered to communicate the latest enshittifcation to consumers yet. When asked for comment by Adweek, Amazon offered a redundant lie about how total ad load isn’t increasing (it is) and if it was it would be okay because Amazon is focused on “improving ad experiences”:
“Our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown,” said an Amazon Ads spokesperson. “While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown.”
As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have relegated to seeking old ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like the lax treatment of things like password sharing.
The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the brand begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”
It’s purely extractive and utterly pathological. Consumer interest, employee welfare, and the long term integrity or quality of the brand or product simply have nothing to do with it.
In this case, streaming companies are going to keep pushing their luck until piracy sees a massive resurgence (which is already starting to happen), at which point the executives will blame everyone and everything but themselves. Instead of any sort of self-awareness of the doom cycle they participate in, they’ll do something even more harmful: like lobbying Congress to make VPNs illegal.
Filed Under: ad load, advertisements, amazon prime, competition, consumers, enshittification, streaming, tv, video
Companies: amazon
