Hulu, the United States’ long-time second most popular streaming video site saw its viewership nosedive for the month ended June 30th, after comScore changed their measurement methods.
In May, the site had an estimated 44 million viewers, says comScore, with that number falling to 24 million in June.
The giant drop was the largest of any of the top Internet video sites, dropping the site from second to tenth, in terms of online video traffic in the U.S.
While the number drop seems huge, the new numbers mainly underscore a different and lingering problem; the fact that measuring online audiences remains unreliable.
Three companies, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast, each measure differently, so numbers may be similar but never equal.
Says one digital media strategist of the difference in numbers, and the overall problem of unreliability: “You would think 15 years on, we would be in a better place. But we’re still talking about fundamental discrepancies in things like page counts.”
Result for: traffic
Mashable is reporting today that visitors to Netflix’s site have jumped 46 percent year-over-year for the month of June.
The growth is thanks to the increasing popularity of the Watch Instantly streaming service, and Netflix’s decision to add their native service to set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and HDTVs.
Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney adds that Netflix’s explosive growth is the “fastest year-to-year growth [he] has seen in over five years.”
For the entire second quarter, Netflix’s web traffic was up 34 percent year-over-year. In the first quarter, YoY growth was 19 percent.
Netflix has added 1.7 million subscribers in the Q1, ending with 14 million customers.
Result for: traffic
Although Android 2.0 will not be officially released until Friday, it appears the Google team is already at work on Android 2.1, which should fix a number of bugs and streamline 2.0.
The report comes from Android and Me who says that the site’s analytics reports showed that someone using Android 2.1 had visited the site 24 times, accounting for 0.04 percent of the traffic since October 28th.
