Previously, the developer agreement stated that it would ban apps that used the Alexa app home cards – the cards that appear in the Alexa companion app – that can describe the skill in question or enhance the voice interaction with details provided as text-based content. Now the agreement simply bans skills that contain “any advertising for third-party products or services,” according to the updated documentation. Amazon carves out an exception for streaming music, radio and flash briefing apps (news briefings) where advertisements are not the core functionality of the skill. But other than that, ads are now largely banned on the Alexa platform.
The change has irked some Alexa developers who already feel that it’s too difficult to make money from their Alexa skills, as is. Others, however, are confident that Amazon will eventually introduce its own monetization platform – perhaps through in-app purchases, paid skills, or ways to leverage Amazon Pay (its payments platform) in their skills.
While Amazon is following an ambitious path toward making its voice computing technology powerful and ubiquitous – including by opening access to Echo speaker technology, Alexa’s voice technology, and the underlying technologies that power Alexa’s abilities to understand language – it has yet to fully address the needs of developers who want to build their own app businesses on top of its voice computing platform.
In fact, this problem is so often discussed that there’s an inside joke in an active Slack community for Alexa developers that involves the posting of a snow cone emoji. The joke is that it’s easier to make more money selling snow cones than building Alexa skills. The emoji is posted in response complaints, including, most recently, the change to Amazon’s Alexa Developer agreement.

According to posters in this community, the agreement was updated on Tuesday. We’ve asked Amazon to confirm, but the company declined to comment.
However, you can compare the two versions of the agreement by looking at the one live on Amazon.com, and a version cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine:

In the former, there’s only a one-line description of what sort of advertising is banned – those using home cards – while the newer one broadens that to include “any advertising.”
There was initially some speculation that the change was made in response to technology being developed by VoiceLabs, which has been testing an advertising platform aimed at Alexa Skill developers involving “Sponsored Messages,” as referenced here in a blog post.  These will allow developers to insert brief ads, similar to those in podcasts, but which are interactive.
VoiceLabs’ system allows partner advertisers to connect with consumers who use Alexa’s voice-powered apps. But because any one Skill wouldn’t have enough users to capture that ad spend, VoiceLabs’ system instead combines users across Skills. This aggregated audience is then sizable enough to gain advertisers’ attention and interest.
But VoiceLabs’ co-founder and CEO Adam Marchick disputes the idea it’s his system that’s at all related to the policy change. He says that Amazon has known about Sponsored Messages since January, and has been collaborating with VoiceLabs on its development.
In addition, of the 1,300 developers on VoiceLabs’ platform, the majority of those planning to use Sponsored Messages are creating flash briefings, which are not affected by the new policy.
“Amazon has a really hard job,” says Marchick. “Consumer adoption is growing really quickly for this device, and developers are excited to innovate.”
However, he did caution that advertising has to be carefully considered as adoption grows. “They have a huge hit on their hands, and they want to be considerate of the consumer. To date, we’ve seen some of the advertising, and it’s not been considerate,” he says.