Eighty-eight percent of Amazon Prime Video subscribers watched ads in Q4 2024, according to figures published this week by Digital i.
By placing all Prime Video users on its ad-supported plan by default, Amazon has established the largest ad-supported base in global premium SVOD.
That number neatly captures the current philosophy in streaming: scale first, worry about engagement later. Ad-supported tiers, once framed as a fall-back for budget-conscious users, are now the keystone of SVOD strategy.
But a closer look at viewing patterns in Digital i’s Evolving Streamer Strategies trend report reveals that ad-free viewers spend more time watching.
Across Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+ and Max, ad-free subscribers consistently racked up more viewing minutes than their ad-supported counterparts. On Netflix, ad-free users watched 1.3 times as much as those on the ad tier.
Light ad loads were meant to enable streaming platforms to add revenue without killing binge behaviour. Yet even small interruptions appear enough to shorten sessions and dilute daily habits. Platforms may be growing audiences, but at the cost of thinning out the intensity that once made subscription streaming so sticky.
Ad-funded streaming looks good on paper: bigger audiences, new revenue, happy advertisers. But if ad-tier viewers spend less time, engage more lightly and form fewer habits, the real value of that scale starts to unravel.
Reach is easy to engineer, but as the latest Digital i data suggests, sustaining engagement — the real currency of long-term success — is a harder feat.
Main image by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
