Freevee Advertising Explained

What happened to Freevee, in order

Freevee started as IMDb TV, was rebranded Amazon Freevee, and ran as Amazon's standalone free, ad-supported streaming service. Prime Video began showing ads by default in January 2024, which left Amazon with two ad-supported streaming products doing overlapping jobs. In July 2025 Amazon announced the standalone app would shut down (TechCrunch and CNBC both covered it), and the app was pulled in August 2025. By early September 2025 the catalog, including originals like Jury Duty, sat inside a dedicated free section of Prime Video, still free to anyone with an Amazon account and still carrying ads.

Freevee's timeline is worth having in order because much of what still ranks for "Freevee advertising" was written before the change and never updated.

Freevee vs Crackle: how the two compare now

People often search for a Freevee vs Crackle comparison because both were free, ad-supported streaming services. The comparison has changed, because the two no longer sit in the same category of buy.

• Freevee was owned by Amazon. It is retired as a brand, and its content now lives inside Prime Video's free ad-supported section.
• Crackle is a separate free, ad-supported streaming service that was never part of Amazon. It is not reached through Prime Video supply.
• How you buy: Freevee's audience is now reached through Amazon Ads or Amazon DSP, as Prime Video inventory. Any other free ad-supported service is a separate supply source, and whether it can be bought through your DSP depends on the exchanges and deals available in your console today.

So if a plan lists the two side by side, ask what each line actually maps to. The Freevee line should map to Prime Video's free ad-supported supply. The Crackle line, if you want it, needs its own supply path and its own check that it is available to you. Confirm current availability and terms with the service or in your DSP console rather than relying on an older comparison.

Why this still matters to an advertiser today

Older guides, and a fair number of current ones, still describe Freevee as something you buy separately from Prime Video. That is out of date. The consumer brand is gone, but the ad-supported content it represented did not disappear. It sits inside Prime Video's inventory, within the same family of supply that Amazon Ads describes as streaming TV ads. Some delivery reporting may still show Freevee by name at the supply-source level, which makes it easy to get wrong in either direction: assuming it is a dead buy, or assuming it is still a separate live product with its own account.

Why it is worth its own line item anyway

Even folded into Prime Video, free "with ads" content and Prime Video's subscription-tier content are not the same viewing context. In our own accounts we keep them as separate reporting lines rather than one blended line item. A viewer who picks free, ad-supported content is a different signal from a Prime member watching an ad-supported show inside a membership they already pay for.

A shopper choosing free content over a paid alternative is telling you something about price sensitivity. For a value-priced or promotion-driven product, that is a useful signal to isolate rather than average away.

A worked example

If you are setting up a Prime Video buy today and want to isolate what used to be Freevee's audience, look for a free ad-supported or "Watch for Free" option in your Prime Video supply-source settings. Do not search for a "Freevee" line item that no longer exists as such.

For example, on a $5,000 monthly test at an assumed $18 CPM (an illustration, not a quote), you would buy about 278,000 impressions ($5,000 divided by $18, times 1,000). Check the real CPM in your own console before planning, because streaming prices move with demand and targeting.

A checklist before you approve a plan that mentions Freevee

• Does the line say "Freevee" with its own budget? Ask whether it means Prime Video's current free ad-supported inventory or comes from an outdated template.
• Is the free ad-supported audience reported separately from premium Prime Video content?
• If a delivery report shows a "Freevee" supply-source tag, treat it as legacy naming for the same content pool, and confirm the current terminology in your DSP console.
• If a Freevee vs Crackle style comparison is in the plan, is each service mapped to a real supply path you can buy?
• When was the plan last reviewed? A plan built once and never revisited collects stale references like this one.

The common mistake

The mistake takes one of two forms. Either a brand avoids this inventory because a plan template still calls it "Freevee" and nobody is sure it exists, or it treats the inventory as identical to premium Prime Video content and blends both into one line that hides which audience is converting. Both come from the same cause: not updating a mental model after a brand retirement.

reMKTR runs Amazon DSP as a managed service inside Full Circle (100+ brands managed, $500M+ in Amazon revenue managed). We keep free ad-supported inventory as its own reporting line inside Prime Video so that an old brand name does not distort how the data is read. If you want a second opinion on a streaming plan, start at remktr.com.