Hulu Ad Hunk Is Questionable

Sometimes I run across an analysis that leaves me scratching my head because someone has leaped off a data precipice without checking to see if there was a net below, or a bottomless pit. And that's what happened today when I looked at a Silicon Valley Insider take on Hulu's share of the video ad market.

The headline reads, "Hulu Accounts for Almost 20% Of Online Video Revenue ". I looked at the IAB study but couldn't find anything specifically about Hulu. That's when I looked back at the original story and noticed some dubious financial falderal: the author took numbers from separate sources and decided to combine them. Taking an estimate of online ad revenue from the IAB and analyst estimates on revenue and comparing them may seem sound, but it isn't. You'd have to show that analyst estimate for the top sources, taken together, seems in the same ballpark as the IAB numbers. Otherwise you're dealing with potentially two different views of what total ad spending. What if the analyst estimates taken for the field in total were much higher or lower than the IAB figures? Unless you can answer that question, you should step away from the numbers.