How Much Does Hulu Gross per Show?

By Kevin

There are a few data points resulting from the unexpected news two weeks ago that Hulu made a profit in 2009.


  • $100M in revenue in 2009.

  • 903 million videos in January 2010.

  • Triple year over year growth in vids served

This implies 300M vids served in Jan 2009, and an average increase in 50M every month through 2009. An average of 600M per month over 12 months is 7.2B videos. $100M/7200M implies 1.3 cents of revenue per video served. If 50% is shared with owners, we're talking about 0.65 cents per vid served. Wow.

How much money should vid producers expect from this model, since it doesn't seem possible to use this Hulu to pay for a substantial portion of the costs of expensive television programming?

-- April 11, 2010 11:43 PM |

Comments

Stefan Qvickstrom wrote:

Today it's "just" add-on sales for the media producers.

Unfourtunatley all large media producers are sh*t-scared about skipping their prime income channel, the distributors/TV-channels and hence all god TV comes that way today. When one of the majors understand that one) English and Internet are global and two) people have always been paying for TV (cable etc) and would be ok to pay for good media also directly from a producer they will start to make money and Hulu and other sites will either be on that train or be ran over.

Personally, I'm annoyed that this should take so long for others (read media producers) to understand... I bet if you take an already global brand, Star Trek for example (or Baywatch / Dallas / etc) and had people pay a monthly subsciption of say $20 I'm certain that you would easily get 1 000 000 subscribers globally really quick (if it's made by well known people and at least a few achieved actors).

-- April 12, 2010 2:25 PM ∞

Kevin Brancato wrote:

Hi Stefan!

What I find interesting also is the cost to the advertiser right now.

Can it really be that it only costs $0.013 cents for all the advertising on a video? That's 4 or 5 30 second ads per show. You mean, I could potentially buy (non-targeted) 30 second spots in popular shows for $0.002 per (if I promise to buy a hundred thousand of them)?

Frankly, I see a huge opportunity for well-crafted national U.S. political advertising.

-- April 14, 2010 9:01 AM ∞

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