According to that latest Nielsen Online data, Hulu's March had its plusses and minuses. Our friends at NewTeeVee have the skinny:
According to Nielsen, March was a mixed bag for Hulu. The site held on to the No. 2 spot, and served up more streams (348.5 million) - but to fewer unique viewers (8.8 million) than February (308 million streams to 9.4 million viewers).
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Nielsen warns against comparing stats month-to-month because of the refinements it makes to its data collection process, and you’ve got to take any third-party numbers with a grain of salt. With that in mind, while YouTube and the overall online video usage stats were up in March over February — February is a short month, and both were down in March compared to January.
click over to NewTeeVee to read the full story and see the data tables
Considering they ran a significant amount of advertising during the Superbowl the drop in unique viewers should not be all that surprising. They have to be fairly pleased with the number of streams and, this is a guess, I suspect the 12% increase in minutes per user has to be due in part of longer, premium content.
Youtube may get more visitors, but Hulu is making like 10 times the profit Youtube makes
John, 10X revenue, wouldn’t surprise me. Either one of them being profitable right now would hugely surprise me (and just about everyone else). I don’t have enough data to calculate whether Hulu is losing 10x less than YouTube, I’ve seen reports estimating YouTube’s losses at hundreds of millions of dollars per year, (I think $450 million was the latest number I saw) but I have no way to substantiate those estimates.
Wasn’t there a post up here recently about hulu needing 500 million streams or something close to that in order to break even? If they can continue at about their rate of growth ~10% per month, they should be able to reach that mark before the end of the year. Of course, I don’t think that figure included their current problem with selling advertising and the cost of increased server load that would result for increased usage.
I know that ideally they would want more hits AND more unique viewers, but more hits is still good, right? As it my watching Chuck on repeat isn’t for nothing? :p