Peacock Leads In Revenue Per Streaming Viewing Hour
- by Wayne Friedman , March 23, 2023
NBCUniversal’s streamer Peacock tallied the best results for monetizing per hour of streaming viewing in terms of advertising and subscription revenue, according to a report by MoffettNathanson Research.
But Peacock and other streamers are still getting lower revenue from their streaming businesses versus their linear TV platforms.
In 2022, Peacock took in $0.22 in advertising revenue per hour viewed -- leading all streamers -- and an overall $0.42 per hour when adding in subscription fees.
“[This is a] number benefiting from NBCU’s selling of ad space across Peacock and its linear properties as a bundle,” writes Robert Fishman, media analyst of MoffettNathanson. “Peacock also had a free AVOD [advertising video on demand] tier during the period examined, further boosting its advertising revenue.”
Data comes from total viewing of all Peacock subscribers versus total revenue. Last year, Peacock pulled in $2.1 billion in total revenue.
A rough per-month examination of total hours viewed on the service shows that Peacock subscribers watched more than one billion total hours of programming in April 2021, according to NBCU.
Currently, Peacock has more than 20 million paid subscribers and 33 million monthly active users.
Following Peacock are Warner Bros. Discovery’s D2C (direct-to-consumer) services -- HBO Max and Discovery+, which took in $0.36/hour (5 cents from advertising, with 31 cents from subscription). Walt Disney’s D2C platforms, Hulu VOD and Disney+, were next at $0.30/hour (7 cents for advertising, 22 cents from subscription).
MoffettNathanson and other media analysts note that many streaming services are far behind in monetizing viewership for streaming, versus where they are with linear TV monetization of viewership.
For example, Walt Disney leads all major media companies with a top-drawer $0.96 in U.S. revenue per hour of viewing when it comes to all their linear TV networks, while NBCUniversal's linear TV business comes in at $0.68/hour and Fox's linear TV is at $0.65/hour.
