Web advertising rates for certain popular shows can now beat traditional TV rates
Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers.
A “Simpsons” episode on Hulu has just 37 seconds of ads, Nathanson wrote. A broadcast episode has nine minutes and produces three times the revenue per viewer at half the price, he estimated.
(via Bloomberg)
WTSO.net, the most popular repository of pirated Simpsons videos as well as the secret stash that Eye On Springfield steals screencaps from, has view trackers for all episodes in the 20 seasons that the Simpsons has been on air. Most of the top episodes garner over a million views. Hulu’s Simpsons numbers might be the same, if not more so considering the extensive promotion and tie-ins they commit to on a much more popular destination site.
Since they only have 5 episodes on at any given time and over 1400 clips, let’s do some rough back of the envelope math:
5 episodes * 1 million views * $60 CPM for preroll/postroll = $300,000
A day? A week? A month? Likely a month but factor in the other means of how they make money with the CPC ads and takeover ads and the actual number can definitely vary dramatically. But that’s definitely quite a bit of potential dough. The other thing to take note is of course that Hulu doesn’t necessarily keep all that potential revenue. Most of it would be handed over to the studios as licensing and those studios then hand that money over to writers, producers, voice actors, and etc. as royalties. But do it over and over again for other popular shows like Family Guy, Daily Show, the Office, and you’re definitely breaking into the future of entertainment.
