Much has been made of the fact that - according to Hulu's blog - the number of monthly Hulu viewers grew to over 43 million in December 2009, a 95 percent increase over the previous year. Monthly streams grew to 924 million over the same period. Sounds a lot, doesn't it - but what do these figures mean, exactly?
To be able to gauge what inroads online video is making on the traditional, broadcast variety, we really need to talk in the same terms - for instance, what share of total TV viewing this represents. But Internet content companies always measure their performance in terms of users, streams and downloads - because it sounds good and (I suspect) because comparing apples to apples would cast them in an unflattering light.
Well, let's try and convert some oranges to apples: the most recent data from Comscore (the measurement company responsible for the figure mentioned in the Hulu blog) says that "The average Hulu viewer watched 20.1 videos, totaling 2 hours of videos per viewer." So Hulu's 43 million viewers would have racked up 86 million hours of viewing.
How much does the 'traditional' US TV audience watch in a month? Recent Ofcom research put the average figure for viewing in 2008 at 4.6 hours a day, so that gives a monthly total of close to 140 hours of viewing a month per person.
Nielsen, meanwhile, reports that for the 2008-2009 season, there were nearly 290 million TV viewers. Multiply the two figures together, and you get 40.6 billion hours of viewing across the US TV audience as a whole per month. The Hulu figure, if you do the math, is about 0.2% of that.
Is that good or bad? That's a matter of opinion. What I do know, however, is that Hulu's CEO would be unlikely to boast about that figure on his company blog....
