Compete is pointing to some interesting data, and suggesting that Hulu's "evil plot to take over the world" might just be working. The popular video site has surpassed NBC, FOX and ABC's websites in traffic for the first time. And that was last month.
"The networks’ traffic declined during the summer rerun season, but Hulu seems relatively unaffected," notes Compete's Seth Madison.
Compete also put together another interesting graph based on its search analytics reports. This one shows the percent of overall search traffic driven by term categories.
The network name category includes any term that has the name of the network in it (like "nbc tv" or "hulu video"). The show name category is any search term that refers to the name of a show, and the free content category refers to any search term that contains the word "free".
Some stats from Compete:
- Over half (56%) of Hulu’s search traffic in June was driven by branded searches for Hulu’s name
- only 17% of Fox’s traffic and 14% of NBC’s search traffic were driven by searches for the networks’ names
- 43% and 34% of NBC and Fox’s search traffic, respectively, came from terms relating to show names
Hulu's got a long way to go before it reaches YouTube-like proportions, but is clearly gaining some steam with good branding, which is leading it right over the networks that provide its own content.
Compete generally underestimates the traffic volume that websites actually receive. Furthermore, viewing the directly measured data is enlightening in that it shows a more dramatic difference between Hulu, Fox, and NBC. Finally, while not directly measured, it seems that abc.go.com has been receiving much lower volume than Hulu for a while now.
Some construct criticism:
When actual as opposed to estimated data is so easily available, it's probably worth at least including it in the story.
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