As ‘Only Murders In The Building’ Nears Broadcast Run, New Analysis Of YouTube Viewing Shows Only 12% Overlap Between Hulu And ABC
EXCLUSIVE: In the latest sign of the industry’s changing times, Disney last week announced that Hulu original Only Murders in the Building would air on ABC in January. New data provided to Deadline by Tubular Labs shows the logic behind the scheduling move.
Tubular, which is a YouTube measurement partner, has special access to data from the digital video giant and also tracks social video viewing on YouTube and Facebook across millions of global devices. Social viewing centers on trailers and clips rather than full episodes, but it is nonetheless widely considered a reliable proxy for longer-form tune-in.
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Analyzing viewing on official YouTube channels during October (see chart above), Tubular found that just 12% of those who watched ABC content also watched Hulu content. The overlap was even smaller for Disney+ and ABC, at 9%.
For two other legacy media companies balancing linear TV with streaming, the picture looks a bit different. Tubular found a 17% overlap between CBS and Paramount+ on YouTube, while NBC and Peacock overlapped by 45%. (While it wasn’t part of the Tubular study, Fox has a 16% overlap between the broadcast network and Hulu, according to Nielsen.)
Perhaps in part due to the shift of many “next-day” streaming titles from Hulu (formerly a joint venture involving NBCU), broadcast viewers in general are also watching Peacock for catch-up streaming. For ABC viewers, duplication with Peacock was 41%; for CBS, it was 32%.
In looking at both YouTube and Facebook video viewing, Tubular also found that broadcast viewers between the ages of 25 and 44 represented the majority of total viewers during the period. That means that an audience slightly older than the core streaming audience may be available to companies opting to air shows on broadcast TV. Effectively, broadcasting Only Murders on ABC is an extended promotion for Hulu, with a certain number of viewers likely to sign up or find subsequent seasons on Hulu just due to how large the tent of linear TV remains, even in decline.
That promo mojo is not lost on Disney, which has already been experimenting over the past year with giving more exposure on linear TV to Disney+ titles like Ms. Marvel, The Mandalorian and Andor. According to ad tracking firm iSpot, the ABC runs for Mandalorian and Andor delivered the sixth-most ad impressions on the network on their premiere dates. (FX and Freeform numbers were not counted.) Ms. Marvel mustered the 10th-most. Those ad loads pale next to news and sports, but the primary strategic goal is to convert broadcast viewers to streaming subscribers — or else to more engaged viewers if they already subscribe.
Disney CEO Bob Iger recently shared his view of how the various distribution platforms can work in concert to expand the potential of a property. While the exec had signaled last July that networks like ABC “may not be core,” he said at last week’s New York Times DealBook Summit that the management team had largely reconsidered that take after an “unbelievably rigorous” evaluation. For now, at least, traditional TV remains securely in the fold.
TV networks, Iger explained can be operated “in partnership” with streaming services. “They’re a means of aggregating audience and amortizing costs, of basically reaching more and different people.”
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