I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
EDIT: seems like there won’t be ads for everyone straight away.
- Live events, such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising. Customers in the Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man won’t see ads in their experience at this time.
Amazon prime is just the free 2 day prime shipping.
Everything else is just extra thrown in because they can, video, music, twitch sub, cloud storage etc.
So you aren’t paying for prime video so they aren’t taking anything from you by including the ads.
The buy page literally lists videos and music as being part of what you’re buying with Prime, and unlimited storage for photos and that twitch sub are also listed benefit if you click the view more button.
I don’t know why that would be considered “free” since they’re literally advertising those things.
How are any of these things “free” if you’re paying to get these “free” features?
Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:
“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”
You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.
