Hulu Subscriptions to Top One Million This Summer, Proud of Massive Ad Load

Hulu just remarked on their somewhat remarkable Q2 2011. No revenue numbers were released but there were some other numbers including the fact that they expect to top one million subscribers to Hulu Plus by the end of summer.

What?! Really? There are less than a million Hulu subscribers now? I wonder if it's due to them running ads against the paid content, not listening to people when we say "NO that ad is not relevant" and generally having some really poor availability windows on content like only five episodes at a time, 30-day windows, etc.

Did I ever mention that Hulu was a contender to Netflix? If so, I was apparently mistaken. But this goes to further strengthen my thoughts that Netflix should snap up Hulu in one giant bite. Think about it. They'd get the content which they could then offer to their 24 million subscribers. Oh, and another million subscribers...or not. Those people are probably already Netflix subscribers.

Here are some other interesting numbers from the Hulu Q2 blog post:

• Now over 15,000 hours of content on the site
• 28,000 full TV episodes (mostly old, useless stuff some of which are web originals)
• 2,180 TV series (see above comment)
• 25,000 clips (not all that interesting really)
• 1,450 movies (of which I've watched zero)
• Proudly and profitably pay the content community approximately $8 per subscriber per month

What? Is that, like, per piece of content or what?

They also touted the fact that they're the most massive video advertising network on the planet...much to the chagrin of its paying subscribers (that last bit was my own thoughts, not theirs). Here's how they put it:

Hulu serves nearly 2x the number of video advertisements of the next largest advertising service (Source: comScore). Nielsen IAG measures the efficacy of Hulu's video advertising service at nearly 2x that of linear video advertising services.

Really? That's something you're proud of? I guess that's fine, but when you're showing something like 1.5x the average ads per viewer and people are paying and you still show them ads and the fact that you have a reach of just 9.2% of the US population when other ad networks have over 20% (and almost half the the total video ad reach of 45% of the US population) it's not really all that awe-inspiring, is it?

That "next largest" they mention, is Tremor, who has a reach of 21.4%, shows four times less ads per viewer, 80% of the ad minutes of Hulu and...importantly, just half as many ads per month. If I were placing video ads, that's probably the place I would be going.

So who should be bragging about what exactly?