Hulu Delivers Over 1 Billion Monthly Ads

Hulu’s on pace to gross over $250 million in advertising revenue in 2010 (which is very close to my estimates using fuzzy math back in July).

How does the NBC, FOX, and ABC joint-venture for online, time-shifted television and movie viewing generate that much cash? Two reasons. First, it has a lot of advertising clients. Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar told the audience at NewTeeVee Live the site had 352 advertisers in Q3 alone. Second, it delivers a lot of ads.

The latest comScore numbers indicate Hulu delivered 1,109,899,000 ads in October. That’s twice as much as Tremor Media‘s 533,201,000, which ranks second on the monthly charts. It’s a huge increase for Hulu, whose advertising numbers are up nearly 40% since September due in large part to Fall’s new television lineup.

Hulu’s traffic numbers, however, have remained constant. 29,650,000 unique visitors went to Hulu.com

in October, down from 29,890,000 last month. But that smaller amount of uniques watched forty more minutes of content (207.8 minutes up from 162.6 minutes) and over 11 more ads per viewer (38.1 ads up from 27.5).

Google sites still dominated the traditional online video rankings.

Like Hulu, Google’s unique visitor numbers stayed relatively constant at 146,346,000. But the sites’ number of viewing sessions reached a new high, crossing the 2 billion threshold to total 2,019,298,000 (a monthly gain of 6%). Google also experienced and increase in minutes per viewer, clocking in at 271.6 (a 4% gain since September).

Viacom and Vevo also shot up rankings to take the number three and four spots behind Yahoo, while Facebook, Microsoft, and Fox Interactive all dropped in the charts.