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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.

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?

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.

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.

• 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.