The Simpsons Worth More Per Viewer On Hulu Than On Fox

N!NJA writes with this excerpt from PCWorld: "A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com, it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers. Online viewers have to actively seek out the program they want to watch, so advertisers end up with a guaranteed audience for their commercial every time someone clicks play on Hulu or TV.com. Online programs also have an average of 37 seconds of commercials during an episode, while prime-time TV averages nine minutes of ads."

Comments

Re:Probably Because You Can Select the Episode?

[Your.Master]

Err, what? I've never seen a banner ad on Hulu, even when I drop to Chrome (no ad-block).

Hulu ads are interstitials, just like on TV. Sometimes they are exactly ads that I've seen on TV also. They cut in at about the same places too. The only difference is that they only last a few seconds rather than a couple minutes per commercial break.

Aside from that, I don't see how it's obvious that if there were some ad sitting there for the entire show, that it would be more expensive than an interstitial placement.

My friend who worked there since the beta...

[TiberSeptm]

Had explained to me that this expectation - that Hulu advertisements would eventually prove to be more valuable than on-air advertising - was how the company planned on becoming profitable. The justifications he gave were-

• 1) Hulu ads are not skippable so the fear that a percentage of viewers will skip them as they do on DVRs is not there so much.
• 2)Their ads can be somewhat interactive; you can click through directly to the advertiser's site.
• 3) Hulu commercial breaks are not long enough for the viewer to treat them as some sort of actual break in which to check their email, go to the bathroom, or grab a bite to eat. While users can simply do these things and then rewind, Hulu's own experience has found that most don't.
• 4)As an explanation of #3 - they can gather general statistics on user behavior with respects to their videos and ads. They know that the vast majority of users do not get up during commercials, come back after them, and rewind because they can see that few people are rewinding after commercial breaks.
• 5)While they do not sell personal information, they do gather broad statistics on viewers in general as well as some specifics about registers users. This allows advertisers to gauge how many people within specific demographics not only will see their ad, but how many actually responded to it. this lets advertisers gauge rather quickly how accurate any targetting was. They also get feedback from users giving thumbs up or thumbs down to certain ads. This allows advertisers to see fairly quickly if they accidently created an ad that inspires hate rather than shopping.

Anyways, these are the reasons he and one of the executives had given for why they expected to eventually be able to charge a good deal more for 30 seconds of Hulu advertisement than one would normally charge for the same time*viewers over the air. It came up when we were complaining about the studios' decisions to delay some shows by up to 8 days compared to the actual air date. While it was clear this was to prevent an uprising from the affiliates, we still grumbled a bit about it.