TechMediaTalk

Update on ‘Whose Watching Online Video?’

Posted on | February 17, 2009

Image representing hulu as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

 

In Part 1 and Part 2 of ‘Whose Watching Online Video’ I emphasized the importance of knowing your audience and why some generally accepted notions of online audiences may not be accurate.  The recent article “With Hulu, Older Audiences Lead the Way” in the Wall Street Journal (may require subscription) sheds some interesting light on what’s going on with Hulu’s demographics.  

When you look at the audience of well-known Web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, their rapid adoption was fueled by 18- to 24-year-olds. At YouTube’s launch in late 2005, more than 50% of its site visitors were 18- to 24-year-olds.

This was not the case with Hulu.com. When the company launched its public site last March, the largest age group visiting the site were those Internet visitors over 55 years old, accounting for 47% of all site visits, while traditionally younger early adopters accounted for only 17% of traffic.

In my view, Hulu may be the most successful online video site by far.  Not only is it in the top ten video sites (#6 based on ComScore rankings of number of videos viewed in October 2008) within a year of launch, but it is a successful business model for online video advertising.  Its success is a combination of content and painstaking usability design that works.  In many ways it has the simplicity of watching television unlike many other sites where search and navigation is over designed with form leading function.  None of these are original observations on my part, but they are worth mentioning in the context of this post.

What do you think?  Start a discussion below

 

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Category: Consumers

Comments

Leave a Reply