Hulu Has 82M Viewers, and Most of Them Are Seeing Ads (fiercevideo.com) 61
Hulu has broken out some new total audience figures and revealed just how many of those total viewers are watching the company's ad-supported streaming service. From a report: Peter Naylor, senior vice president and head of advertising sales at Hulu, said that his company counts 82 million overall viewers, and added that nearly 70% of those viewers are on Hulu's $5.99-per-month ad-supported plan. According to Variety, that works out to 58 million, or an average of 2.9 viewers per Hulu account. Naylor's comments add some context for figures that Hulu disclosed earlier this month. The company said it now has more than 28 million total customers (26.8 million paid subscribers and 1.3 million promotional accounts). The company also said that its ad-supported audience grew by 43% year over year and that total ad-supported hours watched on Hulu increased by 82% year over year.
Paying money and seeing ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
Paying money and seeing ads? That to me seems as ridiculous as paying for cable and still seeing ads. I hate ads. If I'm paying money there better not still be ads.
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This isn't accurate. We went to their full price "ad-free" model at one point, but discovered that the shows we really wanted to watch with Hulu (most recent episodes) came with ads anyway (one before each episode). It's possible things have changed since then, but it was absolutely *not* worth the money to pay full price and get saddled with ads anyway.
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I found that ad blockers work on video ads as well. So you can get the cheapest 'plan' and still not see ads. Additionally, not sure why anyone would pay for Hulu, there is nothing compelling on Hulu for me to pay for it.
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Not at all like cable (Score:1)
With cable, I don't have an option to pay for an ad-free service. Hulu gives you that option. There are essentially two plans:
1) A full-priced plan with no ads
2) A discount plan that shows ads to cover the cost of the discount
How, exactly, is this unreasonable? Unlike with cable, you have the option to pay for the service with no ads at all. However, Hulu also gives you the option to get a discount on the service, but the ads cover the cost of the discount. Would you prefer that Hulu offer users less f
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How, exactly, is this unreasonable?
It's weird that the ads don't cover the cost of the plan.
Maybe the problem is that they don't have *enough* ads. If they had more ads, then the plan would be free. Or maybe it needs to be progressive: $20/month for no ads. $10/month for one ad every hour. $5/month for one ad every 30 minutes. $2.50/month for one ad ever 15 minutes. $0 month for one ad every 7.5 minutes. It would be fascinating to see what people picked. Or maybe it would display an ad, and you could press a button and you would be c
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It's weird that the ads don't cover the cost of the plan.
Maybe the problem is that they don't have *enough* ads. If they had more ads, then the plan would be free. Or maybe it needs to be progressive: $20/month for no ads. $10/month for one ad every hour. ...
Hulu does have an ad-free tier @ $12.99/month (I subscribe to it). And they used to offer a free, ad-supported tier.
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Er, that should've been $11.99/month.
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>"Paying money and seeing ads? That to me seems as ridiculous as paying for cable and still seeing ads."
Indeed it is. Which is why anyone with any capability has a TiVo or other DVR. So we can store and watch what we want, when we want, without interruption, with easy and fast forward and backwards, and skipping/zooming through anything we want.
Streaming does do that. And thus, streaming with forced ANYTHING is unacceptable to many, many viewers, including me.
>"I hate ads. If I'm paying money there
Consumers don't place much value on their time (Score:3)
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Hulu users see it differently (Score:1)
Watch them drop the ad-supported accounts... (Score:5, Informative)
My fear is that Hulu drops the ad supported accounts, and just throws ads at all accounts. This is what the cable companies did, so I would not be surprised in the least if this starts happening with streaming providers.
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My fear is that Hulu drops the ad supported accounts, and just throws ads at all accounts. This is what the cable companies did, so I would not be surprised in the least if this starts happening with streaming providers.
The day I see an ad on Hulu is the day I cancel Hulu and they never get a penny from me again.
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You know it's currently 3 shows on the entire platform and that number has been dropping consistently from the 8 it was a year ago, right? Most content owners are complete fools.
Buhh..buuh he's a good guy really, he only beats me a little.
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Was going to post something similar... yup: my money would be on them frog-boiling their customers with something like this.
After all, once they figure that the potential revenue increase from ads and the projected loss of customers is non-zero -- not showing ads is therefore money left on the table.
(And hey, if it's wildly unpopular they'll just back pedal for a while; and risk next to nothing.)
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My fear is that Hulu drops the ad supported accounts
I thought that's what they did when they dropped the free tier?
I was a Hulu user from the closed beta days, but I was out as soon as they dropped their free tier. Without a linked cable package they were missing way too many episodes of way too many shows for me to justify paying even a cent, with their offering getting worse and worse as the years went on. By the time they finally dropped the free tier, they were down to only two shows left that I was still watching. Now that I have Plex hooked up to a TV
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Using a streaming TV service has been enlightening in this regard. Some of the ad time is for cable companies to fill in. But most of the ads actually seem to originate from the channel itself. (They're sometimes blacked out due to what I assume is a contractual conflict between the channel, advertiser, and streaming service.).
So in a way, we did this to ourselves. Our deman
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>"This is what the cable companies did, so I would not be surprised in the least if this starts happening with streaming providers."
No its not. Because with cable we have DVRs and can skip anything we like. That is NOT the same as forced ads on streaming. Not even close.
How dumb are those people? (Score:3)
While the majority of Hulu viewers are opting for the less expensive plan with ads, the company still has a large amount of subscribers going for its $11.99-per-month ad-free option. Hulu CEO Randy Freer earlier this month said that his company is going to make a more concerted effort to advertise that package.
For an extra $6/mo you can get the ad free service. Whose time is worth that little?
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Depends on how often you use Hulu.
If you keep a subscription for occasional use, being ad-supported may be the best choice.
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Depends on how often you use Hulu.
If you keep a subscription for occasional use, being ad-supported may be the best choice.
With an average of just 3 minutes of commercials in a typical 22 minute episode, which is probably low, for every hour of content you watch you see about 9 minutes of commercials. If you watch just 2 hours of Hulu a week, you're watching more than an hour of commercials which means you value your time at less than $6 a hour. And 8 hours a month is definitely pretty limited usage for a paid service.
This is just a raw time calculation, not taking into account the disruptive and extremely annoying nature of Hu
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> mans you value your time *relaxing after work drinking a tea or beer or coffee or shake while watching hulu* at less than $6 an hour
there, fixed that for you.
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When I had the ad supported version, the problem was each "break" was the same 2 or 3 ads on all shows. It got the point I didn't want to consume the product they offered.
That's a whole other service (Score:2)
For an extra $6/mo you can get the ad free service. Whose time is worth that little?
That's also nearly the cost of an entire ad-free Disney+ (when It arrives) - just sayin'...
I have always disliked Hulu so much I found $0 was a better price to pay.
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Whose time is worth that little?
Suppose you only watch 1 show per week on Hulu. That's probably 2 30-second ads per week. So that's $6/mo for 4 minutes of time. Hmmm..... For the even more casual viewer, at 1 hour per month, that's $4 for 1 minute of ad time. Hmmm.....
So really, this varies based on how much the customer uses the service.
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For an extra $6/mo you can get the ad free service. Whose time is worth that little?
What person would pay $72/year in perpetuity to remove ads from a single service, when you can just once pay half that—or nothing at all—to remove ads across nearly all services?
Go buy a Raspberry Pi for about half that cost, set up a pi-hole [pi-hole.net], and enjoy having ads nuked across all devices on your home network. Or, if even that much spending is too rich for you (well, not you specifically, obviously), why not get it running in a Docker container [github.com]? With no prior Docker, Raspberry Pi, or pi-hole exp
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It's an open source project licensed under the European Union Public License. Even if they were to get bought out, what of it? The block lists they pull from are independently maintained outside their control, and the software itself really doesn't need regular updates to work just fine. Old versions will work just fine, and anyone is licensed to redistribute, fork, or pretty much do anything else you want with the project, so it's not like it can disappear at this point.
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Many shows still have beginning/ending ads with the “ad-free” service. I am finally getting my wife around to just dropping it. The selections are worse than ever, and a lot of her favorite shows are the ones that still get ads.
Suckers (Score:4, Funny)