14 DAY TRIAL // Hulu, the popular online video venture from some of the major networks in the US, has been gaining popularity and increasing its visitor number ever since it was launched in 2007. But the huge growth it has seen in recent months seems to be dropping off and the number of overall video streams increased just 4.4 percent in April, according to the latest reports from comScore.
Hulu registered massive growth between January and February this year, when it saw a 42 percent rise in unique visitors and a 33 percent increase in videos streamed. That growth was mostly attributed to the Super Bowl, which featured a Hulu commercial exposing it to millions of people who didn't know it existed. The Super Bowl ad was followed by a powerful marketing campaign featuring a number of celebrities. This allowed it to continue to grow in the February-March period, with a 14 percent increase in unique visitors and also a 20 percent increase in the total number of videos streamed. This growth made it the number three most popular video site in the US that month, a position it still holds today, with 'Google Sites', meaning mainly YouTube, coming in first and Fox Interactive Media sites second.
In April however the hype seems to have died down and, although Hulu did see a slight growth in some areas, it was far less than in previous months. The video site increased its number of clips streamed by 4.4 percent in April, growing from 380 million in March to almost 397 million. However, the number of unique visitors actually went down by a small percentage, going from almost 41.5 million the previous month to just 40.1 million in April.
Hulu has been proving that networks can make money by making their content available online for free, as there were a lot of people looking for an alternative to TV, other than file sharing. But some say that most of the growth can be attributed to those already looking for a service like this, and since most of them are already currently using Hulu, in order to grow it will have to entice the dedicated TV watching crowd, which may prove more difficult.