Hulu Falls Short In Comparison To Blockbusters

If you massage the stats enough, Hulu's an entertainment giant, hanging neck and neck with this year's most popular movies.  If you adopt a more objective perspective, however, it becomes pretty clear that the video-centric site hasn't exactly achieved blockbuster status.

In a report released this afternoon to NewTeeVee, Buzzpoint put Hulu just behind The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and ahead of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Up, and The Hangover in terms of revenue and opening weekend gross.  The catch is that Hulu's revenue for all of 2009 ($120 million) had to be counted to keep it in this group.

Similarly, Hulu topped Buzzpoint's list related to visitors and audience members at opening weekends.  By quite a lot, too - 42.5 million pairs of eyeballs focused on the free site, while runner-up New Moon attracted just 20.0 million watchers.

But the Hulu data covers the whole month of October, not a couple of days.  And it's hard to imagine that every Hulu visitor spent two or three hours completely focused on the site.

The Buzzpoint report concluded, "While Hulu's content strategy is obviously centered around television shows rather than movies, these comparisons to Hollywood nevertheless help illustrate the lengths Hulu needs to travel in order to become a true blockbuster."

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The Top 50 Sites in the US (as of November)

Compete puts together a monthly ranking of the top 250 Web sites in the US, based on unique visitors, and breaks up the data by relevant categories and behavioral segments. The firm is sharing the top 50.

"Despite continued concerns surrounding the economic recovery, holiday shoppers flocked to the Web in November," says Compete. "Of the 20 fastest growing Web categories last month, 13 were shopping related. November 2009 saw consumers shopping online for home and garden merchandise, searching for rebates and reading shopping blogs in record numbers."

Here are the top 50 Sites in terms of unique visitors:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of categories:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of traffic:

"If Web traffic is an accurate representation, Santa will be wrapping up a sleigh full of electronics this Christmas," says Compete. "In fact, 73.7 million consumers shopped for electronics in November, a 12 percent increase over 2008. Best Buy saw one of the month’s most dramatic Web site traffic increases – 74.6 percent month-over-month; the electronics retailer drew 29.5 million UVs to BestBuy.com. Gamestop.com (6.2 million UVs) and Newegg.com (5.9 million UVs) were also among the top gainers in November."

Unsurprisingly, bargain and coupon sites drew heavy traffic. It will be interesting to see how the lists shake out after the holiday season.

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November Online Video Trends A Mixed Bag

The latest numbers regarding online video viewing are in from Nielsen, and they reveal some interesting trends.  In effect, things are looking good on a year-over-year basis, but stacked up against October, November didn't go so well.

Let's hit the positive aspects of the Nielsen Wire report first.  Unique viewers, total streams, and time spent per viewer are up year-over-year by 11.4 percent, 17.0 percent, and 12.5 percent, respectively.  And those are pretty respectable numbers.

Unfortunately for video sites, the same counts decreased by 0.2 percent, 0.5 percent, and 5.8 percent on a month-over-month basis.  Which isn't huge, perhaps, but is still a move in the wrong direction.

As for the overall rankings (we won't play favorites by characterizing them as either good or bad) YouTube came in first, with Hulu and Yahoo rounding out the top three.  Then Microsoft's properties followed in fourth place, with Fox, Megavideo, and ABC on their heels.  ESPN, Blinkx, and the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network complete the top ten.

Oddly, Facebook - which moved from tenth place in September to third place in October - was absent from the November rankings.  We've got an email out to Nielsen on the matter.

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Hulu is Seeing Record Numbers

comScore Video Metrix has released its monthly look at the performance of online video content properties. As usual, Google sites dominate the picture, largely because of YouTube, which gets 99% of Google's video views.

The real story, however, is that Hulu is achieving record numbers. The site ranked number 2 (though significantly behind Google with 3.1% market share compared to Google's 37.7) during the month of October, with an all time high of 856 million videos viewed.

On top of that, the average Hulu viewer watched 20.1 videos during the month, representing another record for the site. This amounts to about 2 hours of videos per viewer.

Here's a look at the top ten online video content properties for the month of October:

Some other highlights (not Hulu-specific) from comScore's findings: 

- The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: BrightRoll Video Network with 16.5 percent penetration of online video viewers, Tremor Media Video Network with 15.5 percent, and BBE with 13.6 percent.

- 84.4 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

- The average online video viewer watched 10.8 hours of video.

- 125.3 million viewers watched nearly 10.4 billion videos on YouTube.com (83.1 videos per viewer).

- 41.1 million viewers watched 313.5 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).

- The duration of the average online video was 3.9 minutes.

It is worth noting that Nielsen released some data last week, which put Facebook in third place among video sites, just behind YouTube and Hulu. According to them, Facebook had about 217.8 million streams in October. Make of that what you will.

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