Hulu: Nielsen is Undercounting Our Site Visitors

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 15, 2009 - 6:32am.

New York - Hulu, the online video joint venture between News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) and Disney (NYSE: DIS), has raised objections to methodologies used to count Web video views, as Internet audience measurement firms Nielsen Online and comScore counted 8.9 million and 42 million visitors to the site in March, respectively, The New York Times reported.

Nielsen also reported that Hulu served 373 million streams in April, compared with 348 million in March and 309 million in February.

Conversely, Nielsen also saw a drop in unique visitors to the site over the same period, from 9.5 million in February down to 7.4 million in April.

Web broadcasters like Hulu, along with most other Internet firms, despair when they believe their traffic numbers are allegedly being underreported, as this directly affects their ability to attract advertising revenue.

Even given the complaints, Hulu's traffic is up 490% over the past year, according to Nielsen's numbers.

The Times reported that Hulu staff members expressed their frustration to Nielsen this week in email exchanges.

While declining to comment on the emails, Hulu senior vice president for advertising Jean-Paul Colaco told The Times that "there is more work that can be done with all of our research providers to ensure that online video metrics are accurately represented to users and clients."

http://www.hulu.com