Hulu advertising: more expensive than TV

Written by Kelsey Brookes Friday, 26 June 2009 03:48

According to PC World, it costs more to advertise on Hulu than on TV, with rates of $60 per thousand viewers as compared to $20 - $40 on TV.

The reason for this is fairly straightforward, when you think about it:

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.

David Poltrack, chief research officer at New York-based CBS, cited a Neilsen discovery that fewer online ads means viewers are twice as likely to remember a commercial they've seen on Hulu than on television, Bloomberg reported.

Of course, viewership isn't large enough at this stage to completely write off TV advertising, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Free content delivered online via services such as Hulu are more easily tracked (who needs a Nielsen box when you have an IP address?) and can result in more targeted contextual advertising reaching the right viewers.

It could also mean the difference between life and death for shows such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles whose viewerbase was known to be extremely large online.

Read the full article on PC World.