From our friend Brian Stelter at the NY Times comes news that Hulu is challenging Nielsen's audience counts for its site.
Personally, I take any publicly available web measurements with a bushel of salt, except those from Quantcast.com for "Quantified" directly measured sites. Our own Quantcast traffic numbers match our internal numbers very closely.
Does Hulu, the Web’s most popular place for TV viewing, reach nine million people a month or 42 million?
Millions of dollars in advertising revenue may hinge on the answer. But no one seems to know for sure how big the site’s audience is.
Any way the streams of shows like “Fringe” and “30 Rock” are counted, it is clear that Hulu’s growth has been explosive, up 490 percent year over year, according to Nielsen Online. Hulu executives, however, are fretting that the company, one of the leading purveyors of ratings data, is undercounting the site’s visitors. They say Nielsen’s numbers hurt Hulu’s perception among advertisers and the press.
While Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, another measurement firm, comScore, counted 42 million. Exacerbating the confusion, Nielsen’s numbers for April show Hulu losing audience while still managing to add video views, also known as streams.
lots more where that came from at - NYTimes.com.
