Hulu Is Growing Faster Than YouTube - Online Video Usage Trends for March

According to new research released from Neilsen Online, almost 10 billion (9.6B) video streams were viewed in March of this year by an estimated 130M US web users.  This represents almost a 40% (38.8) increase year over year from March 2008 and is an increase of 9% month over month from February 2009.  And...  there's more...

Hulu Keeps Pumpin'

In February of this year, Hulu overtook Yahoo as the second most popular online video destination in terms of total video streams (308M for Hulu vs 250M for Yahoo).  That being said, Yahoo still had a much larger audience in terms of total uniques (24M for Yahoo vs. 9.5M unique viewers for Hulu).  When you look at the data for March, Hulu has maintained that lead and is now kicking more Yahoo butt when you look at total video streams (348M for Hulu vs 231M for Yahoo).  Yahoo does still have a 3 to 1 lead when it comes to uniques.

Finally, if you look at the growth in terms of videos streamed in March vs February of this year, you can see that Hulu grew 13% while Youtube grew 6%.  One month of data is really not conclusive but the growth rate for Hulu does seem to be on a roll.  I would bet that the Hulu TV commercials are helping with this.  Even my father, 65 years old told me that he now watches shows on Hulu after seeing the super bowl commercial with Alec Baldwin.

As a side note, it is interesting to see the tremendous growth at MTV and Turner...  Anyone know the reason?  Maybe had to do with anticipation of the 2009 MTV Movie Awards?

Here is the Raw Data from Neilsen for March