14 DAY TRIAL // Hulu had a really great year, with a sizeable revenue jump and a lot more new subscribers.
According to a blog post by Hulu, recounting the year’s highlights for the company, Mike Hopkins, the company’s CEO, announced that revenues grew 44 percent to $1 billion (€731 million) in 2013, while the number of paid subscribers reached 5 million.
About half of the entire number of subscribers views content on various devices, while the other half uses Hulu for what it calls “living room viewing”.
Hopkins also talked about the content provided by the company. “We are continually adding to the content available on Hulu and Hulu Plus–this year, we grew our Hulu and Hulu Plus offerings to include premium programming from more than 488 content partners, providing over 86,000 TV episodes, 2,900 TV series, and 68,000 hours of video on Hulu and Hulu Plus (and growing),” he wrote.
Furthermore, he mentions that they’ve launched more than 20 Hulu Originals in 2013 and the number will double over the next few years. “Shows like ‘The Awesomes,’ ‘Behind the Mask’ and ‘The Wrong Mans’ performed extremely well on the service, and were among the top 10 most-watched shows on Hulu each week a new episode aired,” Hopkins said.
Hulu expanded its roster of advertisers to more than 1,000 brands over the past year, the company’s CEO said, mentioning that this was a 15 percent increase over last year. Considering consumption grew over the year, this means that a large slice of Hulu’s revenue came from ads.
According to the post, viewers streamed over 1 billion content videos in each quarter and spent approximately 50 minutes per session in the last three months of the year.
The company plans to continue investing in content, technology and people and 2014 will be the year to find new ways for growing the business from the “strong foundation” that it has built.