You’re not imagining it: There are more ads on Max now

Inflation sucks, but at least when a company directly raises prices, the impact is transparent. A lot of times, though, the effect is obscured by companies minimizing actual price hikes, and instead just giving us less for our money — you might see this at the grocery store in the form of sizes getting smaller. With streaming media, a company can achieve the same thing by reducing the quality of the service it offers, and one to do that which is a lot more subtle than dropping half your licensed content is just by squeezing in more ads.

Last week we heard about Amazon’s Prime Video increasing the amount of advertising it showed from 2–3 minutes an hour to 4–6 minutes. We didn’t love that, but it turns out Amazon is far from alone here, and PCWorld has uncovered evidence that Max (or soon to once again be HBO Max) has quietly done basically the same thing.

Like Netflix and other streamers, Max offers a variety of plan tiers. There’s the premium 4K option for $21 a month and the standard 1080p plan at $16, both ad-free. But then there’s also an ad-supported basic plan (still at 1080p, at least), available at the reduced rate of $10 a month.

If you visit Max’s support page for questions about advertisements on the service, today you’ll find the company telling customers:

If you subscribe to the Basic with Ads plan, ads will play before and during shows and movies (about 6 minutes of ads per hour).

But what PCWorld noticed is that this number has gotten a bit higher over the last few months. When the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine visited the page on February 16, Max was singing a different tune:

If you subscribe to the Basic with Ads plan, ads will play before and during shows and movies (about 4 minutes of ads per hour).

When the site next archived the page on February 28, the current 6-minute language was in place.

Max and Amazon are far from alone in increasing the ad load on subscribers, and the practice is more or less standard across the industry. But it’s one thing to just get the impression that you’re sitting through more ads than you used to, and another when a company clearly communicates what you should expect like this. For that, we have to give Max at least a little credit.