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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!)
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.