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

Guaranteed?

[William Ager]

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.

Re:Guaranteed?

[L3370]

I've actually caught myself watching these commercials when viewing tv shows online. Knowing the commercial lasts only 20-30 seconds, it felt like I wasn't wasting my time...and would have rather waited anyway just to make sure the video would load without error.

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Stupid

[Niris]

I'm sorry, but the fleshlight doesn't have a suitable advertisement for Hulu.

TV is dead, long live TV

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

Math

[pete-classic]

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

This is going to be what killed hulu

[scribblej]

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.

Re:The right demographic.

[roc97007]

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.

Re:Probably Because You Can Select the Episode?

[sexconker]

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!)

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.