Hulu's Growth Stalls in April

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, June 4. 2009 at 11:45 AM EDT Post a comment

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New data shows that Hulu LLC delivered more video streams in May than in April, but had fewer unique users. So is the Hulu honeymoon over?

Hulu sent out its monthly metrics update yesterday, once again reporting comScore Inc. data before the measurement firm's official release. But unlike in past months, the online video showed slow, stalled, or even negative growth, depending on how you look at the numbers.

The good news is that Hulu is still the No. 3 video property in the U.S., according to comScore, behind Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) -- which includes industry heavyweight YouTube Inc. -- and Fox Interactive Media , which includes social network MySpace .

The number of video views the site recorded grew 4.4 percent to 397 million in April, compared to 380.1 million in March. But that growth wasn't nearly as robust as the growth the site saw in February or March, after the company launched an ad blitz that began with a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl.

Perhaps more importantly, Hulu's growth underperformed the online video market as a whole. U.S. viewers watched 16.8 billion total video streams in April, which was up a whopping 16 percent from March, when they viewed 14.5 billion streams, according to comScore.

But there was more bad news from Hulu, as the number of unique viewers actually dropped in during the period, from 41.6 million in March to 40.1 million in April.

While the average amount of time each viewer spent increased, from 57.9 minutes per viewer in March to 61 minutes per viewer in April -- reversing a trend of declining engagement ever since the site hit a peak of 119.7 per viewer in November. But that means that Hulu delivered about 2.4 billion minutes of video in April, which is flat against the prior month.

While Hulu's growth stalled, other sites continued to show robust take-up. The number of streams delivered by YouTube Inc. , for instance, grew 15.4 percent from March to April. And minutes per viewer at the video giant grew 8 percent.