In addition to HULU cutting its price for its ad-supported subscription service (it’s most popular service) by 25%
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hulu-cuts-price-most-popular-…
They are also eliminating their walled gardens on programmatic advertising in their video ad inventory by opening up a private marketplace. And that ad inventory has seen rapid growth along with rapid subscriptions growth. HULU now has over 25 million subscribers in US or slightly less than half what Netflix pulls in. I do not have knowledge or a reference to what degree and how much Hulu was “walled off” before.
This will include opening up their inventory to supply side and demand side platforms as well sharing their programmatic data with these third party vendors.
Why the change, because that’s the way the advertisers (the people with the bucks) want to do business.
On Jan. 1, Hulu will officially open a new private marketplace for advertisers and agencies to programmatically purchase video ads running across the streaming service’s on-demand and live TV inventory. The PMP will enable advertisers to bid on Hulu’s inventory through their agency trading desks or demand-side platforms without having to go through Hulu’s direct sales team to access its inventory and set their prices.
The timing of the PMP’s introduction coincides with advertisers looking to push more money towards these closed programmatic marketplaces. A recent Digiday survey found that 62 percent of media buyers plan to spend more money buying ads through PMPs in 2019. Advertisers are generally interested in PMP deals because they take the flexibility of programmatic buying — which, compared to going through a direct sales team, can be like buying a product on Amazon instead of schlepping to a store — and combine it with the certainty of knowing whose inventory they are buying by working with a direct sales team.
Ad buyers have noticed the subscriber increase coincides with more inventory being available this year than in the past. “There were certain times of year where they wouldn’t give us inventory. This year wasn’t as bad. In 2017, we were fighting like crazy to get inventory,” said one ad buyer.
Must read for TTD investors. CTV is a Paradigm in the early innings of what will be a huge market. This is for both the ad supported subscription service and the live-TV service.
https://digiday.com/marketing/hulu-private-marketplace-ad-bu…
And more on what a private market place is
https://www.digilant.com/digilant_university/programmatic-10…
Darth