14 DAY TRIAL // Watching online video may seem a very different experience to watching TV but, at least with some content, the trends are very similar. Hulu, the US online video outfit centered on TV content, saw a massive jump in viewership and audience in October in tune with the new TV season and the addition of ABC shows. AdAge, citing comScore numbers, reports that Hulu traffic jumped 47 percent from the previous month, the biggest rise this year.
The online video joint-venture between News Corp., NBC Universal, and Disney has seen its best month yet with people viewing 856 million video in October up from 583 million the previous month. That's still way below YouTube's almost seven billion streams, though this number comes from Nielsen which only counted 632 million streams for Hulu in October. ComScore gets direct data from Hulu so its numbers are more accurate.
In terms of unique visitors, Hulu is also doing much better growing by 10 percent to about 42.5 million viewers in the US. The audience numbers don't follow the jump in streams. but this means that people were also watching more videos, something backed up by the numbers which show that the average user viewed 132 minutes worth of videos up from just 92 minutes in September.
While the numbers bode well for the video site, they're not directly related to anything, the site did rather a natural response to the plethora of new content available, now that the 2009 – 2010 TV season is in full swing. It was also the first month that hit shows from Disney-owned ABC were available on the site. While this rise might not be too unexpected, it does show that the online viewers are not that different from TV viewers and that it's still the hit shows that drive the biggest traffic gains not the so-called “long tail” of older or more obscure shows as it could have been assumed.