Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp.-backed Web video service, was second only to YouTube in March as a destination for online video in the U.S., according to new data from Nielsen Online.
Nielsen’s analysis of online video viewing habits showed that more than 9.6 billion streams were viewed by an estimated 130 million U.S. Web users in March. In total streams, that figure represented a nearly 9 percent jump over the previous month, and a 39 percent increase over figures released for March 2008.
YouTube, Hulu, and Yahoo were the top three sites for streaming video, serving up more than 6 billion video streams among them.
Despite all this traffic, the advertising business model to support online video remains elusive. Analyst projections remain bullish, but the key players, including YouTube and Hulu are still searching for the magic formula to attract advertising dollars.
Brandweek is a unit of the Nielsen Co.
