Hulu says it’s made a lot of progress moving beyond measuring just screens, so it’s likely that research for measuring audiences will be a key component of the company’s Upfront sales efforts this year. “We see now that 75 percent of our viewing is happening on living room connected devices,” meaning on a television screen as opposed to a desktop or a mobile or tablet, says Head of Ad Sales Research Julie DeTraglia.
“Our biggest priority right now is measuring audiences, because we know that there’s a tremendous amount of co-viewing that happens on a television set,” DeTraglia says in an interview with Beet.TV. “You’re less likely to have a family gathered around an iPad.”
At last year’s Upfront, Hulu revealed a new collaboration with Nielsen to enable digital ad measurement through Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings to capture OTT viewing in the living room environment. Hulu said it would have the capability to deliver the accurate measurement of viewership beyond the PC for advertisers on a campaign-level basis.
At the recent 6th Annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement & Data Summit of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, DeTraglia offered an in-depth profile of Hulu viewers as they continue to flock to connected devices in the living room setting. Hulu has 33 million “young and affluent” viewers of its ad-supported offering, according to DeTraglia’s presentation.
As recently as 2014, 54% of Hulu viewing was in the living room, compared with 75% currently. PC viewing declined to 9% from 28%, while mobile slipped slightly, to 16% from 18%.
Drilling deeper into device preferences, Hulu finds that its 5% of tablet viewing over-indexes for older audiences, while its Latino content is more likely to be viewed on a mobile device. Programming about news and information over indexes on PC’s, as do short-form video clips.
Asked about the Digital Ad Ratings initiative, DeTraglia says, “We have made a lot of progress and you’ll probably see more from us on that in the coming weeks. I think this audience measurement will have an impact because it’s a different way than we’ve sold before,” DeTraglia adds. Having third-party audience verification will be “a lot of what we’ll talk about at the Upfront.”
