Hulu Says Revenues Hit $1B In 2013, +43.9%

Hulu‘s not a public company, so it can disclose just the financial information it wants. And of course the numbers CEO Mike Hopkins just revealed in a blog post look pretty good — suggesting that Hulu’s making progress after owners Disney, Fox and Comcast in July scrapped a plan to sell the service. He says that Hulu Plus has more than 5M subscribers, up from a little more than 3M last year, with more than half streaming in the living room. Hopkins also talks up his content offerings, saying that they include “premium programming from more than 488 content partners, providing over 86,000 TV episodes, 2,900 TV series, and 68,000 hours of video on Hulu and Hulu Plus (and growing).” Viewers streamed more than 1B content videos in each quarter, with each session averaging 50 minutes in Q4.  As a result, “Hulu remained #1 in engagement among top ad supported online video sites, and #1 in market share of all premium online video providers, maintaining our commitment to building the world’s most effective video advertising service and delivering industry-leading results for our advertising partners.” The service has more than 1,000 brands advertising, up 15% vs last year. The employee base also is up 20% to 725, with 140 new hires in the second half of this year.  “As we scale the business in 2014, we will continue to invest in content, technology and people.” For what it’s worth, Netflix is expected to end 2013 with $4.4B  in revenues.