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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."
Apparently the advertisers haven't heard about window managers and multitasking operating systems... especially since Hulu goes so far as to tell the viewer how long the commercial will be.
Then again, since Hulu commercial breaks are so short compared to those on television, there is far less of an incentive to do something else.
Note that it sounds like it's worth more per viewer to the advertiser, but not to the TV network. The advertiser will pay more for the Hulu version, but since there's only one of them it brings less income to the studio.
So I don't think you can use this story to go "look, the studios should embrace online distribution" on its own.
Anyone know the numbers of how many viewers the average new episode of The Simpsons gets on both mediums? While it is interesting that the cost per viewer is significantly more online, I doubt the number of viewers on Hulu is within the same order of magnitude compared to how many people view a new episode on standard television. Also I still find it crazy that they're actively fighting Boxee when that only adds more viewers. It would be one thing if Boxee blocked the ads, but it's definitely not the case.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Fuck. No one can do Math anymore. An episode of The Simpsons absolutely isn't worth more by the numbers in the summary. In fact, it's worth about 1/15th as much. Doh!
Maybe the article is worth something, but the summary is so bad I can't bring myself to click.
-Peter
I just started watching Hulu last week. It's a great service! There is only one short commercial per break, and I'm willing to tolerate that. The only thing that would make it better is if they put banner ads around the window and took the commercials out completely.
But that's not what'll happen. The company serves its bottom line. I give it less than six months before they start stuffing commercials into the show, equivalent to broadcast television. There's already at least one advertisment that cranks the volume up to 11 -- some jamacian shit I'm sure you've probably seen by now. It instantly pisses me off when the commercial comes up. It's a great reminder about why broadcast television is shit.
I have to disagree. There will always be hardcores who prefer to torrent a show rather than put up with any amount of advertisement whatsoever, but I think most people have a more favorable level of pain than that. Sitting through a half minute of commercials at the beginning I can do. That's enough better than having the story flow disrupted every 12 minutes that I would put up with it rather than make the effort to download. I don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm even willing to pay a reasonable price. I have no problem paying 99 cents an episode off itunes, for instance, as long as I can back up my investment.
The issues I have with Hulu are (1) resolution (currently sucks) and (2) integration with a media appliance (lacking). I want to watch the show on my primary flatscreen TV using my remote, durnit, not on the laptop messing about with a mouse.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Network, usually.
Just like how the Homer vs New York episode is buried.
(It features a gag involving the twin towers. Get over it, it was 8 fucking years ago!)
Which, of course, is why there are no television ads aimed at young children on TV. Oh, wait....
If you have never been around children, I can understand that you do not know the power of a five-year-old saying, "I want X!"
Slashdot is simply following the dumbening of the internet.
Soon, all /. summaries will be capped at 140 characters.
Saying it's worth more per viewer is like saying hard liquor is "worth more" when you buy it at a bar. You're selling to two different audiences, and a much smaller amount. The Simpsons on hulu might get tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers; whereas the Simpsons on Fox will get millions. Comparing the price for advertising on the two is telling about 1/3rd of the story.
Yes, exactly. My daughter does something similar. It's not necessarily the ads -- If she can't choose the content and control it like a video, she's not interested. This makes the cable TV uninteresting by definition.
I can't make myself just plop down and watch whatever is on. There are too many other things to do. My TV viewing is either movies, or older series that I can watch in sequence (Netflix is great). I am of the "TV viewing" generation, (color became common when I was in grade school) so I can't explain this, except it might have something to do with early (1980's) connection to the internet.
By far, our household's primary usage of cable TV is for wife to watch soaps. (She records her daytime soaps, and watches nighttime soaps -- er, hospital and crime dramas -- live.) Were it not for that, we could easily get along without cable or broadcast TV.
This makes me wonder -- is it a generation thing? Are people of my generation the last of the traditional TV demographic -- the people who plant butt on couch during prime time and watch whatever is on? Could it be that after we die out, or become demographically irrelevant, the whole concept of broadcast TV will cease to have meaning?
That would be so cool... :-)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sorry, but I'm in your generation, and the tv is sitting downstairs gathering dust ;-) I just don't feel plopping down and watching whatever happens to catch my interest is a worthy use of what little time there's left after work and running a household. I'll watch the Daily Show online in the morning before work, maybe some other shows on the web that I've heard or read about it, and that's pretty much it. If it weren't for the occasional guests or maybe a console in the living room for the nieces and nephews at some point i might toss the whole thing out.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
My media consumption is split probably 70-30 online legit content vs. watching it off the TV. I haven't setup my DVR since we moved into a new house but before that, everything went on the media computer. I don't want to mess with downloading and finding content. With a hulu, I know it's there for three weeks...I found with the DVR if it didn't get watched in a week, it was never going to get watched (in a house with six people). I have it setup so I can plug my laptop into the TV and stereo now, if I miss something I'll just put it up on my TV and watch it. Frankly, I think it's fair to watch 2-3 minutes of ads targeted at me vs. 10 minutes typically found on TV. If it means I can watch my shows on my schedule, it's worth it. And, while I think copyright is totally messed up now, I don't think I should be ripping off content producers. At some point, if they can't make money producing content, they will stop making content...right now, the torrenters and copiers are subsidized by the people who consume content paid for by advertising. Once advertising is no longer profitable, everyone loses. I don't know how the landscape will change so producers can make money but it will change...and I'll go along with it. But until then, I think it's perfectly reasonable to watch a couple of ads in exchange for entertainment.