Hulu Now Has 1.5 Million Paying Customers

Sites include Hulu.com . Published on January 28th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

A slowed economy hasn’t stopped certain online business models from surging ahead with healthy revenue numbers, and one such company to benefit last year was Hulu. The streaming content provider posted revenues of $420 million and saw a massive surge in its paying subscriber numbers.

According to CEO Jason Kilar, Hulu’s premium service called Hulu Plus, now has a total of over 1.5 million paying subscribers. This number has grown significantly in the last part of 2011, because you’ll recall that Hulu only had 1 million paying subscribers at the end of summer 2011.

Kilar looks to have made good on the promise to reward Hulu users in general with a $500 million investment in content for 2012, and announced recently that a few new programs (some scripted by Hulu) will be added to the free section of the site. This move is expected to not only keep existing users happy, but attract new users and eventually, paying advertisers. In many respects then, the prospects for 2012 looks good for Hulu. The company failed to reach its $500 million revenue target in 2011, but I can’t see that happening in 2012. Given too that it’s an election year, there will be lots of online video content consumption and Hulu looks poised to benefit immensely from that.

Are you a Hulu subscriber? Let us know what you like about the service below.