Starting September 1, Amazon will be expanding its Fire TV ad revenue share requirements to include non-US streaming services, as spotted by StreamTV Insider. This will require ad-supported streaming services that exceed a specified threshold of usage outside the US to give Amazon 30% of their ad inventory or ad revenue, as is already the policy for ad-supported apps in the US.
Amazon began forcing ad-supported Fire TV apps in the US to share ad inventory back in 2018. If an app has usage of over 50,000 hours per month in the US, it has to send 30% of its ad inventory to Amazon if it wanted to remain available on Fire TV devices. This is a nearly identical ad sharing policy to the one required by Roku for apps on its streaming devices. While Amazon reserved the right to expand the policy to non-US apps, it did not have any overarching requirements for international apps.
That changed in March of this year when Amazon updated its ad share policy to include non-US apps but, at the time, the policy was only expanding to Canada and Mexico with an effective date of September 1, 2023. About a month ago, Amazon updated the policy once again to now include any app in any country. While the usage threshold for apps in the US is 50,000 monthly hours, international apps will be forced to share ad inventory with Amazon when their usage exceeds only 30,000 monthly hours. Additionally, for apps in countries where Amazon does not yet operate its ad network, apps will need to fork over 30% of their ad revenue instead of 30% of their ad inventory. That requirement will take effect a month later on September 30, 2023.
Between Amazon and Roku, it’s estimated that the two companies collectively hold about 80% of the streaming device market in the US. Amazon has been steadily expanding its Fire TV offerings internationally and likely holds a similarly dominant share of the market outside of the US. With that dominance, and with so many streaming services turning to more profitable ad-supported plans, it was inevitable that Amazon expanded its ad revenue share policy to more countries.
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So Apps that don’t have ads, don’t owe Amazon anything?
For example, a paid streaming app that doesn’t have ads?
Or some other utility app that doesn’t have ads?
In addition to this ad revenue share, Amazon gets 20-30% of all in-app purchases, so if you sign up for a streaming service with no ads through a Fire TV app, Amazon will get 20-30% of that subscription fee. As far as I know, this doesn’t affect apps with banner/image ads, like utility apps tend to have. This is all about video ads that streaming services display.