In a posting on the company's blog last week, Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu--the free, ad-supported broadband video venture co-owned by The Walt Disney Company (ABC), NBC Universal and News Corp. (Fox)--provided some data on Hulu's growth over the past year. According to Kilar:
- Monthly users, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, representing a 95% increase over this time year.
- Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, representing a 307% increase over this time last year (note: as TechCrunch points out, while Hulu's monthly uniques have increased only slightly since April, the number of videos watched by each of those uniques has increased significantly over the past year).
- Hulu's content library more than doubled in size, and now has over 14,000 hours of premium content, compared to 5,600 at this time last year (note: 2009 saw Disney/ABC taking a stake in and beginning to provide content for Hulu).
- The number of Hulu content partners grew from 130 at this time last year to over 200 today.
- The number of advertisers/marketers served by the company has more than doubled, growing from 166 to 408.
- 6.4 million Hulu video players were embedded across the Web in 2009, representing a 237% increase from 2008 levels. To date, Kilar claims, Hulu players have been embedded on over 207,000 Web sites.
- Hulu's search service managed nearly a billion queries in 2009, representing a 175% increase from 2008.
- The five most popular shows on the service in 2009 were: "Saturday Night Live," "Family Guy," "The Office," "The Simpsons" and "Naruto Shippuden."
- Hulu's most widely embedded video of 2009 was its live stream of President Obama's inauguration.
- The service's most popular clip in 2009 was a "Saturday Night Live" short entitled "Motherlover."
- The service's most popular full episode was a "Family Guy" episode entitled "Stew-Roids."
