Great blog post by Will Richmond on how much CPM the Hulu online video network might be making off of its premium content. He estimates that Hulu is able to charge about $30-$60 CPM. He also estimates that the online shows of Heroes is able to generate around $0.50 - $0.75 / user / episode. And that is with just about 1 1/2 minutes of ads per show compared to the 20 minutes of ads per show that you currently see on TV.
This past week had a couple of important milestones for the online video industry. On the plus side, a judge agreed with Veoh that it acted reasonably in how it handled unauthorized content distributed on its site. Veoh polices the content and removes offending material, especially when asked by the copyright holder. This victory for Veoh is a victory for the entire online video industry that allows users to upload content.
On the negative side, NBC reported great audience numbers for its online Olympic video streams. The problem was that they were actually number 2 behind Yahoo. But the really sad part is that despite streaming 72 million videos, they only made $5.75 million or 7.3 cents per stream in video ad revenues. Despite the fact that everyone expected that they would get a large amount of interest from viewers, NBC could not interest many advertisers in including their ads.
But this is only a temporary negative. These great audience numbers will probably convince advertisers to place their ads in the online coverage during the 2010 and 2012 Olympics.
