When Hulu announced that they had acquired the entire Seinfeld collection, Twitter was pumped. This week, the iconic sitcom was finally available to stream, so we turned to ListenFirst, a company that measures the impact of brands like Hulu based on digital engagement across all social platforms. ListenFirst measures the reach of consumer brands using their Digital Engagement Ratings, which is an aggregate of daily engagements based on “owned, earned and organic consumer behavior on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube.”
While Seinfeld has an enormous following among many demographics, the addition of the catalog to Hulu gives the show a brand a new lift. Jason Klein, co-CEO/co-founder of ListenFirst Media, told us via email that:
Seinfeld and Hulu coming together is a great example of the incredible impact that a long standing linear program brand can have for the new world of over the top programmers.
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ListenFirst noticed that Hulu enjoyed a “great lift digitally” in the lead up to the release of Seinfeld, between June 19 – 24. Some of their findings:
- Hulu garnered 1.4M engagements on digital in the five days leading up to release, with Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter all seeing massive increases in engagement, according to ListenFirst Digital Engagement Ratings (DER)
- Seinfeld brand related-content on Hulu’s social channels generated an enormous uptick across owned social channels – Hulu’s Facebook presence was up by 326% compared to the previous five days, while Instagram was up by 163%, Tumblr by 1,024%, and Twitter by 58%.
- In the five days leading up to the release, there were over 470 press pieces covering the program
- On the day the catalog was made available, there were over 4.4K tweets mentioning both Hulu and Seinfeld. Conversation about Hulu also reached its peak over the last 28 days on June 24th.
Last week, Hulu announced that they would be able to offer Showtime programming to subscribers for $8.99, which is two bucks lower than what cord cutters would pay for Showtime’s new OTT on its own. With the addition of add-on packs and legacy programming like Seinfeld, Hulu is poised to become just as interesting as Sling or skinny cable bundles.
Who needs original content when you have Kramer?