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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.
Actuallu, they don't ahve all the episodes.
It does depend on the show. For example, all the episodes of Simon & Simon are available, but only a few Simpsons.
I hope this means that will changes.
One of my favorite shows in the 90's was 'NewsRadio'. It interesting that on Hulu the season after Phil Hartman died isn't there. I wonder if that's just good taste on Hulu's part(that last season is horrid) or of the network just wants them forgotten.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I honestly can't wait until I don't mind watching adverts. That is, they're MORE FUCKING RELEVENT TO ME. I would ENJOY giving any company my personal data if it meant all the adverts I viewed were very relevent to my needs.
Its not a good idea to compare watching commercials on TV vs. Hulu. One major difference that should be taken into consideration is the fact that there is only one commercial between segments of shows on Hulu; while on TV there are multiple. Its easier to "remember" the commercials after only seeing one rather than multiple but at the same time the overall revenue that the episode gets per viewer would probably be much less.
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.
My daughter, aged five, watches youtube, managing to plug in and switch on the PC, login to her mum's account, start Firefox, type "you" and then somehow (this part I've not yet figured out) bootstrap herself into cartoons, music videos, and other random nonsense. She clicks on similar videos and can watch TV like this for several hours. My son, two, is almost there too. I guess, thank god youtube removes adult content.
First, they ignore the real old cable television, it's utterly uninteresting for them. Secondly, they watch each youtube clip from start to end, and treat advertising, if any, as part of the content.
How can this //not// be more profitable than legacy TV?
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.
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.
This is wrong. I'm about as hard core as they come piracy wise; as long as I've known about the internet I've pirated all my movies and TV shows as a matter of principle.
Recently, a friend suggested I watch babylon 5, so I started watching them on Hulu for some reason. Hulu only has up to season 2, and when I finished watching that, all of a sudden it seemed like a huge fucking hassle to have to torrent them. The difference in convenience between click->watch in 30 seconds (after the 1st hulu ad) and click->watch in 15 minutes (after the torrent finishes) cannot be overstated.
Not to mention, anyone under 30 should easily be ADD enough to tab over to slashdot and read 2 stories in the time it takes a 15-second hulu ad to play.
What's the point of blocking Hulu's ads? They last no more than 30s, and you have to wait for that time anyway... There's a little timer that tells when your show is gonna be back, so just get up and get a drink. Sometimes I think people block ads just to be able to. You're not gaining anything, and you're giving Hulu a reason to no longer be free. If Hulu cannot generate some stream of revenue through selling ads, just how the heck do you expect them to continue to provide you the content you're there to see? Or do you expect the content should just be free for everyone? Really, I'm trying to understand the point...
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
...I can watch Hulu (or any streaming video for that matter) in ~30 seconds. On the other hand, even on a decent connection it might take 30 minutes or more to successfully torrent a show (especially one with few seeders or one with all the episodes bundled together). There are times that I have a few minutes to kill and want to watch a show so I usually put on YouTube or Hulu rather than have to wait for my torrent to complete.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
What twin towers?
Soon, all /. summaries will be capped at 140 characters.
If Slashdot is going to embrace Twitter, will it also use those characters to rag on "M$ Windoze" through over a dozen sockpuppets?
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.
Because lawyers hate when people are happy.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I wonder what the costs are for a broadcast versus a webcast? For a broadcast you'd need to coordinate multiple stations and time zones, there are power costs to push the signal, station costs, licensing costs.. For a webcast there's the server and pipe sized to the load you expect. Maybe you need Akamai or some other similar system, but I expect that it's much cheaper than broadcast.
For most TV channels, it is much more expensive to broadcast via the web than it is to broadcast via standard television. The obvious reason being that TV channels are set up to broadcast via, well, TV. All of the equipment is already bought and paid for, the processes are in place, the staffing level set, etc. Now you throw this wrench in the works of suddenly asking a TV channel to worry about digital codecs, about digital delivery, about server capacity, all this other crap... it becomes a huge clusterfuck. And it means adding staff, adding equipment, redirecting resources, etc.
I'll say that when Hulu first launched, I was responsible for getting some clips - just clips! - ready for one of the launch channels. We were trying to do the minimum required of us because we knew it was going to be a big headache. And it was. First of all, most of the tapes (yes, tapes) were stored off-site and needed to be located and transported. Then they needed to be digitized, then edited, then encoded. At the time, Hulu would allow you to submit either flv's or "mezzanine" files that were either mpeg2 files (yes, mpeg2) or QuickTimes using the DVC Pro codec. Well, we tried both flvs and QuickTimes and had major problems with both. First, encoding to flv from our digitized files took approximately 24 hours for each clip. (You don't realize how large uncompressed digital files are.) So that was obviously out. Rendering from Final Cut to DVC Pro was much quicker, so we did that. Then we had to figure out how to actually get them the files, and it turned out buying a bunch of drives and FedExing them all over the place was really the only way. But then every flv they encoded from our files ended up stretched, because they couldn't figure out how to handle the non-square pixels that were in their own QT spec (the spec calls for a 720x480 file at a 4:3 aspect ratio).
All of this (plus dealing with the metadata and various other things) ended up taking up basically 100% of my time, plus 100% of two PAs' time, plus a large chunk of various other departments' time, plus probably 30-40% of my boss' time. And we had to buy a bunch of new hardware and software to do all the encodes ourselves that we ended up doing, and come up with all new processes.
You have to think about all the hidden costs. It's not just a case of "oh webcasting uses no bandwidth so it's practically free". Would it be "free" if, say, you suddenly asked General Motors to start making rubber ducks or bathtubs instead of cars? That's pretty much the equivalent. It is a totally new process that needs to be created from scratch. There's almost nothing about webcasting that is similar to broadcasting.
It doesn't even save money after you've got things set up and running somewhat smoothly, because now you've got *two* separate processes going on - broadcast TV still exists and will exist for the foreseeable future.
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.