There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams.
The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span.
Much of the site’s growth between January and February can probably be attributed to its prime time Super Bowl commercial, which introduced the site for the first time to millions of viewers. Since then the site has kept up a star-studded marketing campaign to keep awareness up. I suspect that most of the site’s new users earlier this year were the low hanging fruit — people who would love to watch their TV and movie content on their computer screen, but didn’t know that Hulu even existed. Now the site is going to have to convince the die-hard TV fans to switch up their viewing habits if it wants to keep the same momentum going. Hulu Desktop, one of the first products to come out of Hulu labs, may help with this. But it’s going to be hard to break people out of old habits.
Update: As commenter Shahar Nechmad points out below, some of the drop off may have had to do with the timing of the broadcast of new content (though most prime-time shows were still on the air through April, so I doubt that can be blamed in this case). With that in mind, it won’t be surprising if we see Hulu growth continue to slow over the summer, when most hot shows aren’t on the air.
That said, Hulu’s still the number three video site in the US, which isn’t half bad.
this may have to do with them not adding as many new shows and the old series being over…
Exactly what I was thinking. Hulu is always going to trend according to the start & stoppage of TV Series. I really do not think this data is relevant.
As an example, I got my fix of “24″ every week Via Hulu..since the season has ended I have not had the need for it until “24″ comes back.
I may start catching Late Night with Conan on there though…
Hulu will never trump YouTube’s traffic as Hulu doesn’t host user generated content. There’s just too many new YouTube videos created on a daily basis for Hulu’s traffic to ever surpass that of YouTube’s.
Plus, people want tv quality experience when watching tv. They want to sit in their comforable chair and look at the tv, not sit in an office chair and look at a portion of the computer monitor.
Hulu is only good for missed must see shows or SNL digital shorts. Besides the comercials suck ass.
weird. hulu’s content is certainly more compelling than say….youtube… or similar sites.
You need to remember that this month many very poplar tv series like Heroes, Lost and 24 and others have ended. This is enough on its own to take viewership down dramatically.
Good point, will note that in the post. But most shows were still on the air in April, which is what this report covers.
YouTube & Vimeo don’t have the same seasonality as with major networks (TV.com & Hulu.com).
In April the season finales start and people may be more interested in watching episodes as soon as they are released. Remember, there is generally a gap between the time an episode is broadcast on cable tv vs online.
i would agree. The slow down in numbers maybe due to the lack of new content from the top shows since their seasons are ending. Also, people will more likely watch the season finale on television then online. hence the lower numbers in april.
This was my immediate hypothesis as well. People don’t watch when there’s nothing new to watch.
It would be informative to compare Hulu numbers with regular network TV numbers for the same timeframe. If they correlate strongly it would imply that Hulu has successfully moved parts of the broadcast TV model online.
They should put all the seasons on Hulu.
Lost isn’t on Hulu
Hmm, so this wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that international users masquerading as US visitors have dropped off the charts / have been blocked would it. All the savy enough americans likely already know about Hulu enough to be using it as they see neccesary, Added special content could pull “waiters” over the line. The market seems ripe however with Netflixs’ streaming service also beiing somewhat of a competitor. Maybe the market is reaching saturation in the US?
theres only 300 ish million people in america and your not allowed to watch it abroad.
This should be changing because itunes for way too much money is now showing US shows in Canada.. again WAY too much money…
Fuck Hulu, I refuse to use their site until they stop attempting to block Boxee.
That’s fine, you and the 200 users of Boxee can go elsewhere.
It’s hitting a saturation point, which is normal for this type of site. The restrictions on US vs. international is causing the bottleneck too.
I’ll echo what Will has stated. Although I’m not sure the exact reasons as to why NBC is limiting it’s viewership solely to Americans (although my guess is governing regulatory bodies such as the CRTC here in Canada) but opening up to other countries will most likely be the best method of generating traffic. Not everyone knows how to set up proxies you know…
uh well there’s only so many people in Amercia. TC seems to have a hard time understanding that most of the world doesn’t have Hulu. And therefore, don’t care and can easily figure out obvious answers to questions like “Why isn’t Hulu growing anymore lololololol” [Answer: America is running out of people] USA != World (imagine that).
Stop trying to attain the level of retardation that is normally reserved for television, this is the internets.
What Joseph said. Open it back up to Boxee and I’ll come back and I’ll stop telling my friends to tell their friends and anyone else who will listen to stop using the service….I’m sure I’m the reason why there’s been a dropoff…heh.
I’m not sure if this is scenario contributes to Hulu’s widespread drop in growth noted above, but I’ve been watching significantly less now that there are no new episodes of any of my shows that I have in queue on my Hulu account. When my specific shows pick up next season (hopefully they all get renewed) I’ll definitely start watching Hulu more frequently.
i think the hardest is finding stuff to watch and not just clips, full episodes, and full seasons. Not to cool to try to jump into a show with episodes 5,6, 7 from season 3.
I agree that the winding down of the TV season and the warm spring/summer have people spending time elsewhere. It will ramp up again this fall.
This type of drop isn’t all that significant. Even less so when you take into account Comscore’s weak representation of Internet usage.
Not only big shows – but most other shows finished their new eposides in late March. Lost isn’t on Hulu. I went there last night and couldn’t find any thing new that I watch. However in Jan and Feb I was watching shows almost everynight, sometimes 3 or 4. Now there isn’t anything to watch but some lame clips and shows I don’t care about. And if I did want to start up a new show, they expire the older episodes and I don’t want to start a new show in the middle of the season, I want to go back and start from the first episode.
I expect they will go though the same audience shrink that the networks go through during the summer.
Yeah, I would attribute it more to the fact that shows aren’t on right now. I subscribed to all my favorite shows through Hulu, and when they stopped coming, I stopped visiting.
I’m in Thailand and we don’t get Hulu here. I suspect there’s a lot of other countries that can’t access Hulu. Their international growth is crippled.
Hulu is US-only; for the rest of us, we can’t even pay to see Farah’s story or see any of the videos. Just a pop-up jumping up and denying any access to anything – but please leave an email address…
… and still no news. I’d personally be delighted to whip out the credit card to watch some US programming – without the 12+ month wait.
Ian W.
much better site than YouTube IMHO!
Well. I basically stopped using Hulu after two events:
1. “House” and “Bones” shows are now delayed for 8 days after TV broadcast. That basically drove me to “the dark side” to get my fix for these shows.
2. A few months ago, Hulu’s video performance went dramatically down for me on full screen mode. I had to lower my screen resolution to watch shows smoothly. It was probably a flash thing, but it forced me use either ABC site, Netflix, or the “dark side”.
It’s summer, there are no new episodes of our favorite shows to watch on Hulu, so of course people are not going back anymore.
It’ll be back again in fall.
Proof Hulu still rolls with regular television. Expect it to rise again when the Fall-Winter-Spring shows start running.
Not surprising at all… Hulu showed great promise initially, but…
Their search function has not gotten any better. Searches weeks ago were pretty lame not able to interpret the fairly common – construct/directive
A support email to them was never answered.
For people unfamiliar with show offerings from network and cable outlets, available content is hard to sift through – nowhere that I was able to discover were you able to get a simple list of adventure show titles – although if you want to know what is most popular, that is pretty easy to discover. Hulu could learn a lot about how to categorize shows and present search results by visiting TVLand.
Very little new content has been added over the last few weeks. Granted, the end of the current season recently passed, but there are lots of legacy shows that could be added – I’d watch many of them if they were available.
I’m surprised nobody has considered the number of users/viewers who access video sites via smartphones (iphone, blackberry…). many phones don’t support flash… so lets wonder how many people that accounts for, as well
I’m back to Pirate Bay…The drip-feed of TV series on Hulu is too slow for my tastes.
Well, it has become obvious that more people are going to use Hulu when their favorite shows are actually “in-season”.
However, and I may be wrong, but I think Hulu doesn’t “hold” as many episodes on the site. Now that shows are being hosted on the provider’s website directly, Hulu is going to face a bit of a challenge.
For example, I could watch all 13 seasons of Southpark on Southparkstudios.com, an entire season of prison break on Fox on Demand etc…Hulu only holds maybe 10 episodes?
That may contribute to the decline…more competitors are popping up…with equal advertising power.
I like Hulu, but if they don’t get new shows as they come begin, then they will not be around as long as they want.
The Fox stuff only appeals to certain crowds.
Jason et al at TechCrunch: Great online metrics research but these kinds of embarrassing factual oversights (e.g., the ending of the prime TV season, doh!) could be avoided if you called the subjects (e.g., Hulu) to get their side of the story before publishing.
the 8 day waiting and limited time frame for showing are going to be big cripplers as well.
i know my girlfriend refuses to wait, so she’ll pop over to ninjavideo instead and just grab everything a day later.
in this age of ‘on-demand’, why wait 8 days?
It’s all for a very simple reason; people come for content. no content – no users.
And I’m not talking about content that’s available on TV. Why would you use Hulu for that? unless you are not in the US, but then Hulu doesn’t broadcast outside the US anyway.
Basically, they are not ready to give up the cables 7 years exclusives… I hope that when they wake up it wouldn’t be too late like the music industry.
More than likely it’s because all of the seasons of popular shows are over (Psych, Lie to Me, The Office, Monk). It will probably pick back up once we enter the new seasons again.
It is going slow because there isn’t a lot of major/new additions.
From hulu user.
I’ve still found no reason to go back there — other than to check if I’ve changed my mind.
Could someone please explain me how these metrics can be trusted when there is such a huge difference between comScore’s and Nielsen’s Unique Viewers estimate??????
comScore says 40 millions
Nielsen says 7 millions
Nielsen’s estimate is almost 7 TIMES smaller than comScore’s! What the heck???
Why would you trust more comScore’s stats than Nielsens? And most of all why would you trust any of those sources??!!!!
The only folks that really know how many streams are delivered are the ones dishing them out. PCTVCables.com
@Tim, note that Comscore stats say unique “viewers” (Jason K. sorry but you got this wrong in your article too) not unique visitors. These are completely different stats.
Nielsens 7 million (that you allude to) is how many people went to Hulu.com. That number is unique visitors.
comScore says 40 million unique viewers which is how many people watched a Hulu hosted video on the web…including watching it on Yahoo.com, MSN.com, Fancast.com, joesblog.com…even Techcrunch.
I bet if Jason K. asked comScore the REAL unique visitors number for Hulu, he would find it to be pretty close to 7 million.
Release Hulu for Xbox 360.
I can see the reasons for a slower Mar / April for a site which is attempting to pull viewers from traditional broadcast. However, I think Hulu is missing a greater opportunity where they are more complimentary. Off-season viewer development would be a great usage of Hulu services by providing out of band content, new exclusive scoops, etc. Their engagement could also be used by the networks as an additional source of data for content buying decisions.
They should think of their competition in terms of the network’s site and not the broadcaster distribution network.
Lame movies…
To add to previous commenters posts about how their traffic is tied to the seasonality of new episodes…this highlights a flaw (or opportunity?) in Hulu’s user experience of being so focused on watching what you just missed on TV right now.
1. They should be cross-selling classic programming that is similar to what new shows you like. They need to do this throughout the year so that when SNL is over, they have already planted the seed that you want to watch Stella, etc.
2. Also, it makes a greater case that Hulu needs to find a solution that is financially viable to the pay/cable networks to air their programs on Hulu. These are the networks that often have new episodes in the summer (such as Weed starting on Showtime now)…possibly via a Hulu “Premium”?
3. Finally, as summer nears the end, Hulu could be showing previews, pilots and behind the scenes of the new programming that will be airing in the fall to get viewers excited about the shows they want to launch.
Hulu is quantified. So you can go to http://www.quantcast.com. Global traffic based on cookies is 26 million per month. I would never trust Nielsen numbers. Everybody I talk to with a major website says their numbers do not match internal analytics.
By the way, Quantcast shows an upward trend in traffic since March. Blog writers should really go to Quantcast.com and see if a site is quantified first before quoting comScore and Nielsen traffic numbers, which are known for being inaccurate. If a site has added the quantcast code, it is probably pretty accurate, particularly in that traffic range.
Ian, you want News? Come join us at Webcastr.com. We have plenty of News from lots of sources, everyday.
Not watching because Hulu is in arbitration with the WGA…they have yet to pay the writers any contractually owed royalties which came into force in March of 2008.
Also not watching because SAG hasn’t resolved its new media issues with the conglomerates including NBC/Universal, Fox & Disney/ABC…nobody knows yet if the actors are going to get tip level money (ie current pending contract is voted up) or a better share (contract rejected & better one negotiated). I really don’t want to give Hulu the hits if they’re not going to pay the talent and given how weasel-like they are I’d just assume wait. I’ve got plenty of places to watch stuff legally (satellite, DVDs, NetFlix, Redbox, local library, iTunes, Amazon Unboxed). Some of those don’t make me sit through commercials…I appreciate that, life’s too short to fill it up with advertising.
Finally as yet none of my favorites are on Hulu (Law & Order Criminal Intent, Burn Notice & Mad Men). Those I watch on cable or on DVDs. And yeah Hulu’s movie selection is weak.
On the international front I hear Hulu is frantically trying to work out deals for local advertising & some non-US programming as well as foreign rights for non-US Hulu audiences. Hope they don’t try to charge advertisers 3-4 times the going TV rate (that’s what they did to the US advertisers so they’re having trouble selling ads at Hulu now).
If they’d get their act together Hulu could be a really good site.
Hulu’s ads are cute, but I don’t think they really promote their product well enough. The viewer is so tuned into the extraterrestrial aspect of the ad that they don’t really hear what the ad is all about. If they focused their ad just a tweak, I think it would bring in a lot more people.
Slowly growth combined with speculation of a paid subscription model cannot be merely a coincidence. Hulu in my mind is a 100% certainty of becoming a pay for use service.
Enjoy it while it lasts my friends…
http://zrdavis....od-to-be-trulu/