Longer commercial breaks lower the value of ad-based streaming subscriptions
Amazon Prime Video subscribers arenβt the only streaming customers being subjected to longer commercial breaks lately. Warner Bros. Discoveryβs (WBD) Max has increased the amount of commercials it shows to US subscribers from approximately four minutes per hour to about six minutes per hour.
A US support page for Max currently says that subscribers to Max with ads βcan expect about 6 minutes of ads per hour.β But PCWorld noticed this week that this differs from what Max used to claim, which as recently as February was βabout 4 minutesβ of ads an hour, per the Internet Archiveβs Wayback Machine. Some of Maxβs geographies have smaller ad loads. For example, WBD's support page for Saint Kitts and Nevis says Max ad subscribers should expect about four minutes of ads hourly.
A 50 percent increase in the duration of commercials that US subscribers see puts Maxβs ad load on par with that of Prime Video, which AdWeek reported last week also increased its ad load from four minutes per hour to six minutes per hour. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, according to earlier PC World reporting, and Peacock shows to five to seven minutes of ads hourly, per The Streamable.
Β© HBO