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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."
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?
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.