I love watching television on Hulu. For example, check out my Hulu Treasure Hunt, featuring the shows October Road and What About Brian?
And by the numbers, many many others do as well. Hulu served 1.3 billion ad impressions in May, according to NewTeeVee via comScore’s Video Metrix report. If that number alone doesn’t impress you, that’s more than one quarter of the total video ads served in the month. The breaks down to the average Hulu viewer getting served 47.6 ads during the month.
The thing about Hulu’s ads – and video ads for quality content on the web, I’d wager – is that they work. For example, I was catching up on this past season of The Biggest Loser, and I must have seen trainer Bob giving his pitch for Quaker Oatmeal during the video ad break at least a dozen times over the course of a number of episodes. I am now convinced that eating Quaker Oatmeal for breakfast is healthy on the basis of trainer Bob drilling this information into my head, along with the claim that it is the only cereal that he eats.
Video ads for content that you like (i.e. content that you’re willing to wait a minute or so to see more of during ad breaks) also work because you can surf the web, return e-mails, or do other computer-based work while they run. I’d argue that this peripheral ingestion of advertising messages actually produces a stronger sense of “brand awareness” – as our friends in the advertising industry might say – than traditional television advertising does in this increasingly DVR-driven age.
These phenomenal numbers also clearly prove out that television on the web is popular. Television shows that drive revenue for content producers and distributors has to mean good things for the future of serialized content.
And here at TV Geek Army, we consider that to be a very good thing indeed.
