Hulu Grew Big by Getting Promoted Directly on Pirate Sites

• During its first tough days, Hulu had the oftentimes involuntary support of the pirate community.
• The streaming service somewhat blackmailed pirate sites to force them to add bans that promoted it.
• This is an approach that has been proven to work well but is generally not widely adopted in the industry.

An interesting revelation about how Hulu Plus went from obscurity to prime-time during its early days came from a Tweet of Jay Rockman, a former manager of the marketing and business development in Hulu. Rockman stated that he contacted every illegal streaming platform that was big enough to make the effort worth it and threatened them with legal action if they didn’t accept to add a Hulu Plus banner on their website. In some cases, he even offered them $0.5 CPM or an affiliate fee, so those that had no better way to monetize their traffic happily accepted.

As Rockman explained, these platforms were precisely where the audience Hulu was looking to attract was gathering, so for Hulu, it felt the right thing to do no matter the specifics. Making a deal with multiple illegal platforms may sound like a shady thing at first, but Hulu was actually directing casual pirates back to legal options of content consumption. Rockman made deals with sites that had over 20 million unique visitors per month, so the effect of this atypical campaign has surely been significant.

This conversion of pirates into legal streaming platform subscribers isn’t a new idea, but it has never actually been deployed in the magnitude it deserves. Back in March 2019, we discussed how a company named “DMCAForce” promoted a similar approach, hoping to get copyright holders onboard and focus their efforts and resources towards affiliation deals with large pirate sites. In theory, it was a feasible proposal that made sense, but it never actually took off.

Now, Hulu’s former executive’s comment comes as a confirmation that this approach works, and it works well. It helped the service welcome its first two million paying customers back then, whereas today, and based on Q1 2021 data, Hulu has 39.4 million subscribers. Now, the company continues to use data that derive from the pirate community, evaluating which content licenses to buy based on the popularity that these titles have on illegal sites.