Why Advertisers Should Not Be Scared of Hulu
As I was watching another TV show on hulu with my TV sitting dark in my living room – I started thinking about how TV has already started this major shift to a new medium. When a full hour show on normal broadcast TV is cut down to by more than 15 minutes by skipping past all the commercials on my DVR, I started to wonder how will these advertisers let this content shift to a medium where they have less advertising time?
I have been pondering this until just last night. When watching a episode of Family Guy for a nice laugh – I noticed that I didn’t even care that I was actually watching the small commerical spots inserted several times during the show. Not only can you not fast forward through them – but hulu is kind enough if you have already watched the ad and you back the video back up before it – it will not play the ad again.
I believe that advertisers will actually pay more for the spot on hulu than on broadcast TV for several reasons:
- The viewer is actually going to watch your ad
- You can target your ads to certain demographics that hulu provides you (ie: they could show different ads depending on who is watching the same show)
- Better tracking of when and where their ads are being shown (today they have to rely on Nielsen to estimate how many viewers are watching. With hulu – they know how many people have watched their ad)
Bottom line – I don’t think Advertisers or the content creators are going to be the losers of this new medium shift. The losers are going to be the cable & satellite providers trying to charge $50-75 for something people can get in like quality on demand. These companies can only make it becoming the best Internet provider offered for the customer.