Prime Video Ads Despite Paying: 1,069 Reviews (2026)

Amazon Prime Video holds 4.67 stars on Google Play from 5,647,311 ratings. 224,647 of those ratings are a single star, and 427,116 of them, 7.6% of everything the store has counted, are 1 to 3 stars. On the App Store it holds 4.76 from 3,047,640 ratings. Those are healthy numbers, and they are the reason this piece is about the negatives rather than the average: at this scale the minority is still hundreds of thousands of people.

We pulled the 16,000 most recent US Google Play reviews, a continuous run from 7 April to 17 September 2026: 164 days, a review on every one of them, no gap in the daily counts. 9,788 of them were 1 to 3 stars, and 3,898 of those negatives were substantial, meaning at least 120 characters rather than a bare "worst app". 76.2% of the substantial negatives were one star.

1,601 of the 3,898, or 41.1%, mention advertising. Narrow it to the reviews that mention advertising and also mention paying, subscribing or a membership, and you still have 1,069, or 27.4% of every substantial negative in the corpus. More than one in four. 82.6% of those 1,069 are one star, above the 76.2% baseline.

Nothing else in this corpus is close to it. The next largest cluster, reviewers writing about the full screen control and subtitles, appears in 210 reviews, 5.4%. The one after that, the player losing your place in a title, appears in 76.

The Complaint Is Not "There Are Ads"

This distinction is the whole article, so it is worth being precise about it. Almost nobody in these 1,069 reviews objects to advertising as a concept. They object to the order of operations: they paid first, and the ads arrived afterwards, on the thing they had already bought.

Used to be a great platform. Paid a little more so you could avoid commercials. What happened? I'm still paying but now I'm paying for commercials. Just doesn't seem right! Oh, I could pay MORE for no commercials, but the point is I bought a product that originally had no commercials, but somehow there are commercials now.

I purchased an Amazon Prime membership expecting an ad-free streaming experience, but I'm still being shown ads. It's very disappointing to pay for a premium subscription and still have interruptions.. feels misleading and significantly reduces the value of Prime.

That is a complaint about a product changing under a subscription that did not change price in the customer's mind. It is a different complaint from "this free service has ads", and it produces a different rating.

What the Subscription Actually Buys

Reading these reviews, the thing reviewers in this corpus describe is not one charge but three, stacked:

• The Prime membership or Prime Video subscription itself

• An additional charge to remove advertising

• A further rental or purchase price for a large share of the catalogue

172 of the 3,898 substantial negatives, 4.4%, say explicitly that removing the ads costs extra. A further 82, or 2.1%, describe the rental wall sitting on top of a subscription they are already paying for. These two often appear in the same review, and the union of the two groups is 191.

just wondering what the subscription actually covers ? you have to watch long ads while the movie is playing. and all the good movies are for rent.

Waste of money. Almost all the good movies are available only for rent even after subscription. even the worst part is the ads even after buying a subscription

Why do I have to see those stupid 2 min ads after paying the price? and you still block content in the name of subscription based products that I have to separately purchase on top of prime subscription. You can go on and provide those locked content and show ads or keep them locked and let me enjoy what I paid for and show no ads.

The first of those is 147 characters and asks the question the other thousand are circling: what does the subscription actually cover?

The Ad-Free Tier That Still Shows Ads

Here is the sharpest finding in the corpus, and also the smallest, so we want to size it honestly before quoting it.

50 reviews, 1.3% of the substantial negatives, say they paid the extra charge for ad-free viewing and are still shown advertising. Fifty is not a large number against 3,898. It is a large number against zero, which is what a customer who has bought the removal of a thing expects to see of that thing.

I paid extra for the Ad-Free option on Prime Video, but I still have to watch a skippable promotional ad before starting almost every movie or series. What is the point of paying extra for an ad-free experience if I’m still forced to watch ads?

Paying for ad free still has many shows "only available with ads". No way to filter out the ad supported junk. Update 9/12/25: More and more movies and shows are "Only available with ads" despite paying for ad free. They also don't seem to offer a way to hide the ad supported items.

Poor excuse for content. pay for ad free tier and still get ads in the guise of "its a promo, not an ad". then jerked around by customer service. and the fact we pay for this slop yet 90% of their content is behind pay walls anyway. at the point we may as well go back to cable.

I have used it for years. got sick and tired of all the ads that got ridiculous. saw the words "go ad free" hahaha there are still some ads and they said that I will still encounter "some ads" then what am I paying for??

Two things in those are worth separating. The first reviewer and the third both describe promotional spots for Amazon's own titles, which a platform may well not classify as advertising. The second describes something different: individual titles marked as available only with ads, inside an ad-free subscription. We cannot adjudicate either from review text, and we are not going to pretend we can. What we can say is that four hundred characters of a paying customer's time went into the distinction, and the distinction was not made clear to them before they paid.

22 more reviews, 0.6%, say the skip or fast forward control is missing or does not work during ads. That is small, and we report it as small.

No Version Broke This

We checked for a regression, because a dated cause is usually the more useful finding. There is not one here.

The monthly share of substantial negatives that pair advertising with paying runs 26.3% in April, 25.2% in May, 30.0% in June, 27.6% in July, 27.1% in August and 29.3% through 17 September. That is flat inside the noise of a corpus this size. The 1,069 reviews carry 99 distinct build numbers between them. There is no release where this begins.

So the honest framing is not that an update introduced ads. It is that for the entire 164 day window we can see, roughly 27% of everyone who wrote a substantial negative review of Prime Video wrote about paying and being advertised to, and that share did not move.

One limit on our own number, stated plainly: this is a share of complaints, not a share of customers. People who consider the ad tier fair value do not write about it. 27.4% means that among people already unhappy enough to write, this is what they were unhappy about, and nothing else in the corpus came close.

The Same Sentence in Four More Languages

We then ran the search across 20 more Google Play storefronts in their own languages, which added 11,638 reviews the US pull had not seen and 2,599 more substantial negatives. 615 of those mention advertising, and 199 pair advertising with paying or a subscription, concentrated in Turkish, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish.

German

Immer mehr und immer längere Werbung trotz bezahltem Prime-Abo. Man zahlt bereits für Prime und soll zusätzlich zahlen, um Werbung loszuwerden. Das ist für mich kein Premium-Streaming mehr.

Turkish

Dizi ve filmleri izlemek için aylık ödeme yapıyorum +(reklamsız izlemek için) ekstra ödeme yapıyorum birde istediğim film için ekstra ücret isteniyor bu saçmalığa bir son verin sırada ne var her giriş yaptığımda giriş ücretimi alıcaksınız

Italian

Servizio peggiorato drasticamente. All'inizio non c'era alcuna pubblicità, poi hanno inserito un singolo spot prima di film e serie TV. Adesso la situazione è insostenibile: 3-4 spot ogni 15 minuti che interrompono continuamente la visione.

Dutch

reclame midden in films? dit slaat echt nergens op. belachelijk. ik betaal al. ik wil niet ook nog eens extra betalen om geen reclame te krijgen en zeker niet voor reclame midden in een film. asociaal slecht.

The Turkish review is the three-layer structure in one sentence, written by someone who is paying all three layers. The Italian one is the only place in this corpus where a reviewer dates the change from memory, and we include it as testimony rather than as evidence: a single recollection of "at first there was none" is not a timeline, and our corpus does not reach back far enough to check it.

What You Can Actually Do

There is no fix here in the sense of a setting to toggle, which is why this piece has no troubleshooting steps. The ads are the product decision. What is left is arithmetic.

Work out what you pay now, add the ad-free upcharge, and then add the rental prices of the three titles you actually intend to watch. Compare that total against a competitor's plain subscription. That is the comparison a large share of these 1,069 reviewers say they made after the fact, and in many cases it is the comparison that produced the review.

If you do subscribe to the ad-free tier, check within the refund window whether promotional spots before titles still appear for you, because on the evidence of those 50 reviews it is not safe to assume ad-free means no video plays before your video.

You can see the current rating breakdown, the newest 1 to 3 star reviews and the complaint themes on our page for Prime Video on Android, along with a cancellation guide and apps like it.

Related reading: HBO Max and the ad-free plan that still shows ads, what Peacock Premium really costs once the ads arrive, and streaming apps compared by what users complain about.