Hulu Is Not Happy With Nielsen’s Web Traffic Reports

Video website service Hulu, led by Jason Kilar and joint partnership between NBC, FOX, and Disney is not happy with the way that Nielsen has been reporting their traffic figures.  In March, Nielsen reported that Hulu received about 8.9 million visitors, but comScore reported 42 million.

Generally when traffic is monitored, it makes the most sense to collect the data from servers directly.  Third party figures are usually off because there are many other variables.  What irked Hulu the most was Nielsen’s reporting of the unique visitors.

Nielsen reported that Hulu’s video streams in 373 million streams in April, 348 million in March, and 309 million in February.  But then they said that Hulu’s uniques in April were 7.4 million, 8.9 million in March, and 9.5 million in February.

Hulu did receive a spike in traffic after the Super Bowl, but measuring analytics firm Quantcast did not report a drop in traffic.  To track analytics a snippet of Quantcast code is embedded into a website.  “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,” stated Hulu SVP of Advertising Jean-Paul Colaco.

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