Amazon has quietly built an advertising juggernaut, and Prime Video is at the heart of that growth. The tech giant reported $17.1 billion in advertising revenue in Q1 (that’s more revenue than Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount combined), with CEO Andy Jassy telling Wall Street the the company had $70 billion in ads revenue over the trailing twelve months. In fact, Amazon execs now say that Prime Video is profitable in its own right.
Prime Video, of course, made a fortuitous call to flip on advertising for all of its users last year, giving them the option to pay more to opt out. Most, of course, chose to keep watching with ads.
Now the video platform is planning to leverage its newly year-round slate of live sports to grow that pie even more.
“As we’re walking into this year’s upfront, one thing continues to be incredibly clear: And that’s premium content, particularly live sports, it’s not just going to be strong, it’s accelerating, and in large part, it’s because it’s delivering measurable outcomes for businesses that they can rally around,” says Tanner Elton, VP of U.S. ad sales for Amazon, in an interview. “Sports is one of the most valuable medias that the brands are seeing, and we’re seeing this on Prime video as well.”
Prime Video, of course, has NFL Thursday Night Football, which now draws live audiences comparable to the games on linear TV. But it has since added NASCAR, the NBA, the WNBA and other deals with the likes of Duke University and The New York Yankees that fill the annual calendar.
“Prime Video is no longer an alternative to linear, it’s competing at the broadcast level,” Elton says, adding that it is competing in the ratings even as it also delivers a younger audience. “In the NFL, TNF skews seven years younger than linear linear audiences. The NBA is nine years younger. Even NASCAR is five years younger than linear audiences.”
And now the company wants to leverage those sports to bolster its entertainment offerings, and create event-type moments, starting with this year’s Thanksgiving week. Its deal with Duke will see Prime Video get Duke vs. UConn on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, with the John Madden biopic (starring Nicolas Cage as Madden) set to debut on Thanksgiving. Then Prime Video will have its annual Black Friday slate stacked with NBA and NFL games.
“We’re looking at all of these moments that really matter, where we can surround entertainment content and sports content for brands,” Elton says. “I think one of the best examples that we have of that is what we’ve done for Black Friday. It’s hard to think about Black Friday when you’re not thinking about Amazon, because it’s one of the biggest shopping days of the year.”
And Prime Video will lean further into women’s sports, with Elton revealing that it has already sold out of inventory for this year’s WNBA season.
“We’re going into it sold out, that’s how much demand is there for it,” he says. “Now, what that allows us to do, which is different than than linear networks, is we have the ability to create a lot of shoulder content, a lot of surrounding content around it. And what our customers are telling us is we want more of that content. So you will see more of that content being created within Prime Video, but also there’s fandom associated with what’s going on with on Twitch, surrounding women’s sports content that’s exploding in many ways. It’s not just a moment. It is a step change in how marketers and consumers are consuming this type of sports IP.”
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