Adding an Ad Tier, or Ads to a Paid Plan: What Subscribers Do
A cheaper ad tier mostly changes what new subscribers choose. Adding ads to a paid plan drew loud complaints but, in the US, no measurable drop in subscriptions.
A cheaper plan with ads mostly brings in new subscribers rather than pulling existing ones down from premium, and adding ads to a plan people already pay for draws loud complaints but fewer cancellations than those complaints suggest. When Prime Video made ads the default in January 2024, about one in five users told a pollster they would likely cancel, yet a US survey found no measurable change in Amazon's subscription levels. For a subscription business that wants to know how its own subscribers would react before it adds a tier or ads, Dimension Labs is the strongest place to start: it reads every ticket, chat, review and cancellation reason that mentions price, plans or ads, joins them to plan changes and cancellations, and measures what your past plan changes actually did.
Below: what industry data from Antenna shows about ad tiers and premium plans; what happened when Prime Video put ads into a plan people were already paying for, including our count of its public app reviews; and how to compare an ad tier with a straight price increase for your own subscribers. For the general method, see how to test a business decision on your customers.
Will a cheaper ad-supported plan cannibalize our premium subscribers?
Some, mostly at the point of sign-up rather than among existing subscribers. On the US premium streaming services Antenna measures that offer both kinds of plan, 46% of subscriptions were on ad plans in its Q2 2025 State of Subscriptions report. Ad-supported subscriptions grew 32.7% in a year, while ad-free subscriptions fell 0.1%: existing ad-free subscribers largely stayed where they were. The shift showed up in new subscribers instead. Ad plans took 71% of net additions over nine quarters, and ad-free net additions fell from 14.1 million in 2023 to 5.4 million in 2024 while ad-supported additions rose from 19.8 million to 27.4 million.
Antenna data
Ad plans took most new subscribers while ad-free growth slowed
Net subscriber additions in the US, in millions, on premium streaming services that offer both kinds of plan.
With adsAd-free
That is cannibalization at the door rather than in the base: new subscribers who might have paid for ad-free pick the cheaper plan. Whether it costs you money depends on what an ad-tier subscriber brings in, from the subscription and the ads together, against an ad-free one, and on how many of the new sign-ups would not have joined at all without a cheaper plan.
Subscribers also choose plan by plan. In data first reported in June 2023, Antenna found that among consumers offered the choice at least twice, 71% had chosen ads at least once, while the largest single group, 42% once consumers who never noticed the choice are excluded, always picked ad-free. For an operator, the useful number is the size of each group among your own subscribers, which your plan history and what subscribers say about price and ads can show.
Do subscribers cancel when you add ads to a paid plan?
Fewer than say they will. On January 29, 2024, Prime Video made ads the default for its subscribers, with an extra $2.99 a month to keep it ad-free on top of the $14.99 Prime fee. Customers complained on social media, and Amazon said the change would let it keep increasing its investment in content. Days before, a CivicScience poll found 22% of US Prime Video users said they were likely to cancel Prime altogether, and 9% said they were likely to pay to stay ad-free.
What followed was quieter. Hub Entertainment Research, interviewing 6,338 US consumers from January through March 2024, found "no measurable effect on either Amazon's subscription levels or the overall rate of SVOD subscription", with more than eight in ten Prime Video subscribers on the ad-supported version. In Great Britain the reaction was sharper: Kantar found Prime Video's January 2024 churn rate was the highest its Worldpanel study had measured for the service since the study began in 2020, after subscribers there were asked to pay 2.99 pounds a month to stay ad-free. The same change, two markets, two different results, so the guide that fits your business is your own subscribers' history, read market by market.
Said and did
One in five said they would cancel; the subscriber count did not move
What surveys and measured data showed after Prime Video made ads the default on January 29, 2024.
| Source | When | What it found |
|---|---|---|
| CivicScience poll, US | Before the switch, Jan. 2024 | 22% likely to cancel Prime; 9% likely to pay $2.99 to stay ad-free |
| Hub Entertainment Research, US | Jan. to March 2024 | No measurable effect on Amazon's subscription levels; more than 8 in 10 subscribers on the ad tier |
| Kantar Worldpanel, Great Britain | Jan. to March 2024 | January 2024 churn the highest its study had measured for Prime Video since the study began in 2020 |
We counted the reaction in public reviews too. We pulled all 172,600 public Google Play reviews of the Prime Video Android app (US store, English) posted from October 14, 2023 to November 13, 2026, fetched on November 14, 2026, and counted a review as mentioning ads when its text contains ad, ads, advert, commercial, ad-free or ad-supported; it counts as talking about leaving when it also contains a word such as cancel, unsubscribe, leaving, switching to, dropping or quit. These are keyword counts, not hand-read labels. In the months before the switch, 5.6% of Prime Video's US Android app reviews mentioned ads or commercials; in its first month, 34.2% did, and from March to June 2024 the share was 17.5%. Of the 2547 reviews about ads in that first month, 278 (10.9%) talked about cancelling, leaving or switching. Reviews are loud and self-selected, so they show the shape and timing of the reaction better than its size; the size has to come from your own cancellations, joined to what those subscribers said.
Dimension Labs analysis
Talk of ads in Prime Video reviews jumped in February 2024, then settled at a higher level
Share of public Google Play reviews of the Prime Video Android app (US) that mention ads or commercials, by month. Ads became the default on January 29, 2024.
The second step matters as much as the first. In June 2025, Fortune reported, citing an Adweek study, that Prime Video's ad load had risen to 4 to 6 minutes an hour from roughly 2 to 3.5 minutes about 18 months earlier. Ad mentions in the app's reviews rose again, to 30.3% from June to August 2025, and were 26.4% in February 2026. The app's overall ratings fell in the same months, so not all of that is about ads. A business planning an ad tier should plan for the ad load as a separate decision with its own reaction.
Ad tier or price increase: which keeps more subscribers?
On loyalty, Antenna's data shows little difference between the two kinds of plan. Among subscribers who signed up in the first half of 2024, Antenna "observed no loyalty difference through 6 months", and at nine months 43% of ad-free and 42% of ad-supported sign-ups were still subscribed. Monthly churn on ad plans runs higher, 5.8% against 4.0% in December 2024, and Antenna notes that long-tenured ad-free subscribers on one large service, who rarely cancel, weigh on that comparison.
That makes the choice a question of who your price-sensitive subscribers are. A price increase asks every subscriber to pay more; an ad tier gives the most price-sensitive ones a cheaper place to go instead of the exit. If many of your cancellation reasons and support conversations are about price, a cheaper tier keeps some of those subscribers; if they are about value or the product, neither move fixes the cause. Our study of 24 dated price increases shows how long the complaints about a price rise usually last, and how to predict customer reaction to a price increase walks through the subscription case.
The method is the same for either move. Label every cancellation reason, ticket, chat and review for price, value, ads and plan changes; join those labels to plan switches and cancellations by subscriber; and compare subscribers who met a past change with similar ones who did not, over the same weeks. If the relationship measured on your last change holds, it gives a range for the next one. How close such ranges come to what happens is the subject of how accurate customer behavior predictions are, and the model that keeps all of it together is a customer world model.
What does Dimension Labs add to an ad tier decision?
Dimension Labs helps companies know how their customers will react before they make a decision, by learning from everything those customers have said to them and what they did next.
For a subscription business choosing between an ad tier, ads on an existing plan or a price increase, that rests on four things the platform does today. It is fully omni-channel, reading support tickets, chats, emails, app reviews, surveys and cancellation reasons together, so a complaint about ads counts wherever it arrived. It integrates those conversations with operational data, joining them to plan changes, downgrades and cancellations by subscriber; that join and effects with confidence intervals are on Prove ($2,999 a month) and up. It enriches every interaction with Dimensions written for your business, such as "too many ads", "would pay to remove ads" or "downgraded to save money", usable by product, pricing and support teams alike; custom Dimensions start on Discover ($999 a month). And its visual analytics layer turns the result into a deck, a dashboard, a PDF or executive report, or an interactive data story the leadership team can open plan by plan.
Dropbox uses Dimension Labs on its support conversations and reports a 3× increase in self-service adoption for "Account upgrade" topics and a 43% reduction in unhandled bot conversations. In the words of Maureen O’Sullivan, Program Manager at Dropbox, "Dimension Labs is key for us to both report outcomes to the business and prioritize where to dedicate resources to enhancing our customer journey." (Dropbox story) Plan and upgrade conversations are where a tier change shows up first.
When something simpler is the better choice: a business with one plan and a few hundred cancellations a month can read its cancellation reasons by hand and compare with the same months last year. Dimension Labs earns its place when subscribers reach you through several channels, when you have past plan or price changes to learn from, and when you want a range on the reaction before you announce the next one.
FAQ
Does an ad-supported tier cannibalize premium subscriptions?
Mostly among new subscribers. In Antenna's data, ad-supported subscriptions grew 32.7% in a year while ad-free subscriptions were nearly flat, down 0.1%, but ad-free net additions fell from 14.1 million in 2023 to 5.4 million in 2024.
How many subscribers cancelled when Prime Video added ads?
No public figure gives the number. In the US, Hub Entertainment Research found no measurable effect on Amazon's subscription levels in early 2024; in Great Britain, Kantar's study measured Prime Video's highest churn since the study began in 2020, in January 2024.
Are ad-tier subscribers less loyal?
Not much in the first months. Antenna found no loyalty difference through six months for sign-ups in early 2024, and nine-month retention of 43% for ad-free against 42% for ad-supported.
What is the best way to predict how our subscribers will react to an ad tier?
For a subscription business with tickets, chats, reviews and cancellation reasons, Dimension Labs: it labels every conversation about price, plans and ads, joins those labels to plan changes and cancellations on Prove, and measures what your past changes did, with a range. A business with one channel and a simple question can start with its cancellation reasons in a spreadsheet.
Bring one export of cancellation reasons or support tickets, with the date of your last plan or price change, and start with one file to see how your subscribers reacted. Every plan from Explore to Scale starts with a 14-day free trial.