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2 months ago
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Amazon‘s video ad revenue for the 2024-25 upfront period has exceeded the tech giant’s internal target of $1.8 billion, a person familiar with the financials has confirmed to Deadline.
The haul came less than a year after Prime Video began to run ads on all film and TV titles, except for subscribers willing to pay extra to avoid ads. The streaming service hosted its first upfront event during the traditional mid-May corridor alongside traditional broadcast network parents and tech rivals Netflix and YouTube.
The Information reported earlier Thursday on the upfront revenue.
An Amazon rep declined to comment when contacted by Deadline.
In recent years, Amazon has made video advertising a pillar of its broader corporate strategy, pursuing major sports rights as a key element of its ad-friendly programming. The company is in its third year of exclusive NFL Thursday Night Football streams and will begin an 11-year agreement with the NBA in the 2025-26 season.
Along with those offerings on Prime Video, Amazon also operates the FAST service Freevee as well as gamer-centric livestreaming platform Twitch and has highlighted them for advertisers in recent years.
The overall streaming sector has shifted toward ads over the past two years after a longtime initial phase when it was viewed as de facto ad-free and subscription-driven medium. Along with new ad tiers coming to Netflix and other outlets, FAST services have become a large and growing part of the landscape, especially for traditional players looking to replace declining linear ad revenue.
A survey this week from research firm eMarketer said that five streamers would book at least $1 billion in ad revenue during 2024, up from just two in 2020. Amazon ranked third on eMarketer’s list, after Hulu and YouTube, with an estimated $3.13 billion.
