Hulu Tops Video Ad Views, Grosses $19 Million in June

Everyone knows YouTube and its affiliated Google sites are top of the pops in terms of video views. comScore indicates in June 2010 Google captured 144.5 million unique viewers. Hulu’s view counts tick in at roughly 16% of those numbers for a total of 24 million.

But when it comes to video ads viewed, Hulu is second to none.

According to comScore’s new Video Metrix 2.0 – a measurement service that, in addition to a number of other analytic “enhancements,” has the ability to differentiate between video ads and video content – last month online video viewers watched over 566 million video ads on Hulu. Tremor Media Network came in a close second at 523 million, while Google sites clocked in at just over 200 million, 35% of Hulu’s total.

So, what kind of monthly ad revenue can the online video publisher with the most video ad views generate? Let’s find out!

Take the total number of monthly video ad views on Hulu (566,162,000 last month according to comScore), multiply that by the going rate for ads on Hulu (estimated to be a $35+ CPM), and you come up with $19,815,670 in revenue for the month of June.

Now, you may be thinking what I’m thinking: “There’s no way that $19.8 million number is even close to being accurate. A simple multiplication problem can’t possibly come close to estimating the monthly revenue of a complicated joint venture between three Fortune 500 companies.” But our simple multiplication problem might not be too far off.

Hulu recently announced its revenues could reach as much as $250 million in 2010. If you take our $19.8 million in revenue for the month of June and multiply that by 12 months, you get $237.7 million in annual revenue. Our simple multiplication problem turns out to be very close to (and less than 5% away from) Hulu’s own projections.

Hulu’s atop the video ad views charts thanks to its highly effective Ad Selector format – which will soon be adopted by video publishers like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, CBS, Discovery and BBE – and semantics. comScore’s numbers don’t account for the kinds of advertisements that YouTube delivers by the billions. The Video Metrix 2.0 measures “streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.”