Video Watch: Super Bowl Ad Propels Hulu Past Microsoft

We knew last week that Hulu’s Super Bowl ad and its subsequent TV spots drove a surge of new users and viewing activity to the site. This week we learn a little more about just how much it benefited.

According to ComScore data released yesterday, Hulu beat out Microsoft-owned Web sites for the first time in both video views and unique video viewers, and now reaches a quarter of Internet video viewers.

The data show Hulu had roughly 240,000 video views in December, and 250,000 in January. Then, in February, the number leaped almost 30 percent to 332,000. Its unique users nearly doubled from roughly 24 million in December and January to 34 million last month. That growth is all the more striking when you consider how short the month was.

Of course, all that premium video viewing means the site will have scads more ad inventory, and we’ll be watching to see how well it manages to sell that space. Of course Hulu’s marketshare is still tiny compared with YouTube, which hosts 41 percent of all videos viewed, but given its premium content, it’s vastly more saleable.