Roku has announced that more ads will be coming to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future, according to a statement made to the publication Adexchanger (as reported by FlatpanelsHD) at CES.
In the statement to Adexchanger, Roku’s VP of global ad sales and partnerships, Kristian Shepard, said that it will “immerse advertisers in more parts of the screen and home” via interactive and 'shoppable' ad formats.
The ads won’t reportedly be limited to entertainment or media, but will include ads for restaurants and cars. This follows on from Roku's introduction of interactive ads in June 2023 that acted as ‘virtual showrooms’ and allowed users to click around a ‘virtual catalog’, Shepard told Adexchanger. She also mentioned how they had tried this with Subaru and would be looking to expand to other areas such as travel.
Roku is one of the better smart TV platforms on the market, thanks to its simple layout and its constant innovations including a bigger, better menu introduced last year and a free update that makes it easier to find movies and TV shows. Although ads are a necessary revenue for a lot of companies, especially one that prides itself on budget devices, do we really need more ads on home screens?
Yet more ads
In a time where several companies, such as Prime Video, are inserting more ads unless you pay more money, it’s disappointing to see that Roku, whose operating system we have praised before, is now trying to turn its home screen into an ad platform. This could mean that anyone with a Roku device could soon be going from a cluttered, ad-ridden home page straight into an app, say Prime Video or YouTube, that has even more ads in it.
Interestingly, on Roku devices, the home screen is already taken up by a large portion of ads, usually up to one third, so what does it mean if Roku is looking to add even more? Currently, Roku does explain how you can change your ad preferences on its website, from what types of ads you see and even how to hide them. Will you be able to do this with these new ads after they’re introduced?
Hopefully, there will be some way to mitigate these ads still, such as using Roku’s method above. But from the sounds of it, it is trying to put its devices in more homes and as Shepard said (via Adexchanger) with “more reach comes more opportunity for advertising”, which ultimately means more money for Roku.
