I’m always talking about how Hulu and other streaming and on-demand services are the content deliver vectors of the future. Well, the future might be here sooner than we think According to Business Insider, Hulu now has more viewers than the entirety of Time Warner Cable’s audience. So far as I can tell, this is the first time a streaming alternative has surpassed a major service provider.
Yet the irony of this is that Time Warner Cable is almost certainly monetizing their programming better than Hulu does. Keep in mind that Hulu does not have the same infrastructure costs – they pump out content over other people’s pipes, whereas Time Warner needs to deal with their own cables. But the real problem is advertising money.
For some reason, online ads on sites like Hulu just do not pay out the same dollar amounts that companies pay for airtime on regular television, which is absolutely nuts considering that Hulu’s ad model is more effective. Typical television viewers don’t pay attention to advertisements, mostly because there are a bunch of them at once; advertisements are what your remote control’s mute button is for. But on Hulu, the ads are between fifteen and thirty seconds in length total. I know that I certainly pay attention to them. One would think that a company would pay more to display the only message that consumers see in a given time frame, but if that were the case, Hulu would have way more money than it does now (not to say it’s unprofitable, but it could be making more money).
Slowly but surely, more data is available citing that online ads work better than offline, especially in situations where consumers are not inundated. Even coupons work better online – the New York Times cites that mobile coupon service Cellfire has a redemption rate of around %15, which is a massive improvement over the less than 1% rate that print coupon sees. It’s an issue of convenience: just as it’s easier to save and use a coupon on your phone, so is it easier to sit through a short ad. And it’s also easier to go to Hulu and watch shows on demand. Let’s not forget that.
