…On Monday, Amazon Prime Video became the latest streamer to embrace the ad tax, tacking $3 onto the monthly bill of anyone who wants to stay ad-free. It’s not just annoying; it’s starting to get expensive.
To watch The Last of Us, you need Max. That’s $20 a month, for the “ultimate ad-free” experience. Stranger Things requires Netflix. Add on another $15.50—and even more if you want to visit the Upside Down on more than two devices at once. Equally enamored with Only Murders in the Building and The Mandalorian? You can bundle Hulu and Disney+ ad-free for another $20. Starting today, if you want to binge The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, you’ll have to spend at least $12 to watch Amazon Prime Video without ads.
Want ad-free Peacock? It’s about double the price of normal Peacock, at $12 per month. Paramount+ doesn’t have a version totally free of commercials, but Paramount+ with Showtime, $12, gets you pretty close. Throw in, say Apple TV+, which is still blessedly ad-free at $10, and the cost of your cord-cutting comes out to about $100 per month—about $40 more than you’d pay if you were willing to sit through commercials on every service. It’s over $450 extra each year.
[The implied revenue of advertising is impressive; the implied viewer demand for paying $1 of advertising vs $1 of subscription fees is also remarkable, and presumably backed by large-scale proprietary A/B tests.]