It’s been just two and a half weeks weeks since popular soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children were reborn as online-only shows — but production company Prospect Park has already decided to cut back on the number of new episodes released online each week. The change in schedule, the company claims, is due to the fact that viewers are “binge-watching” instead of watching one episode a day, and this makes it too hard for them to keep up.

Starting on April 29, Prospect Park — which licensed the soaps from ABC — ran new, 30-minute episodes of each show every Monday through Thursday, followed by a recap on Friday. The shows are available on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes. They’ve received “millions” of views, Prospect Park cofounders Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz wrote in a letter to fans (PDF) this week, and have “consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu.”

But most viewers aren’t watching these shows the way they traditionally watched soap operas on TV. Instead, as with other TV shows online, “our shows are primarily consumed on different days than when they originally air,” Frank and Kwatinetz wrote:

“Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).”

In addition, viewers aren’t adhering to traditional soap-watching habits. When the shows were on ABC, “viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was.” By contrast, online viewers “seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode…yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.”

Prospect Park is also concerned by the fact that, when the shows aired on ABC, viewers often watched both — but online things are different:

“The majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12 PM and 1 PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5 PM and 7 PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.”

Overall, Frank and Kwatinetz conclude that “When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season — so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.”

So starting Monday, May 20, the schedules will change. Each soap will now air just two new episodes a week: New episodes of All My Children will air online on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recap episode on Friday. “Because Hulu agrees with our findings,” the founders wrote, “for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.”

Frank and Kwatinetz acknowledge that “our most dedicated viewers will be upset,” but “we need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online” in order to ensure that the shows “not meet the fate they experienced previously.” The

The numbers were released on Hulu’s blog Tuesday, with Andy Forssell, in his new role as acting CEO, sharing a few other key stats as well:

• The service now offers around 57,000 hours of content on Hulu and Hulu Plus, including more than 70,000 full TV episodes from nearly 2,500 TV series.
• Hulu has more than 470 content partners.
• Hulu has served more than 1000 brand advertisers since launch.
• Hulu Plus is now available on more than 350 million mobile and connected devices.

Forssell also used his post as well as his appearance at the Newfronts in New York to announce a number of new exclusive productions for the site, as well as the addition of All My Children and One Life To Live.

“Right away, you’ll notice we’ve added content categories across the top navigation bar to make it easy to for you to jump to your chosen section – whether it is TV, Kids, Latino, Search, or something else. Inside each category, you’ll discover what’s new in our content library so it’s easy to discover new shows and keep up with the shows you already love.”

Hulu rolled out a revamped website last summer, and relaunched its PS3 app soon after. Hulu’s UI for consumer electronics devices has been in need for a refresh for some time, as it is essentially unchanged since its launch in 2010.

A spokesperson told us Tuesday that the company doesn’t have anything to announce at this point, but it’s likely that other devices will get a UI revamp soon as well.

Users of other services should watch the show while they can. Netflix only has Season 1, which a source familiar with the deal says it will lose on July 1, while Hulu Plus has Seasons 1 and 2.

A press release lays out the timing:

Beginning June 18, 2013, Prime Instant Video will be the exclusive subscription service for streaming the all-new Season 3 of Downton Abbey, and later this year, no digital subscription service other than Prime Instant Video will offer any seasons of Downton Abbey. Prime Instant Video will continue to be the exclusive subscription home through Season 4 and, if produced, Season 5 of Downton Abbey.

It’s easy to see why Amazon wants this deal. Downton Abbey is ”the most popular TV series with Prime Instant Video customers, ever,” the company said.

Fans should still be able to watch new episodes on PBS.org and will continue to be able to buy individual episodes and seasons from iTunes and Amazon.

Also, most of the content will be exclusive to paying Hulu Plus subscribers, and not available for free on Hulu.com. Hulu’s SVP of Content Andy Forssell explained it on Hulu’s blog this way:

“A selection of CBS library shows will also rotate through the free Hulu.com service and we will continue to announce additional titles on a rolling basis.”

CBS had been the lone hold-out among the big four broadcasters. NBC and Fox co-founded the service and have been supplying their shows since the beginning. ABC joined in a little later, but also took a stake in the company. The partnership with CBS on the other hand is a pure licensing deal, with no equity involved.

The other notable difference is that ABC, NBC and Fox all provide their shows soon after air time to the free, ad-supported Hulu.com offering, with paying subscribers getting added benefits like the ability to watch the content on mobile and connected devices as well as having access to whole seasons of shows. Of course, it’s worth noting that CBS isn’t the only one who’d like to see a bigger focus on paid content at Hulu. There has long been talk about Hulu’s parents pushing for a bigger focus on paying and authenticated viewers.

Hulu previously partnered with CBS for its Hulu Japan subscription service, and CBS was also part of a deal between Hulu and teen broadcaster the CW.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Kilar said the company is off to a faster revenue pace than last year, when Hulu grew revenue by 60 percent over the previous year to $420 million. He said the growth of Hulu Plus along with the robust online advertising market are helping accelerate Hulu’s revenue growth. Kilar said the $8-dollar-a-month Hulu Plus service is providing users with good value and the revenue is helping pay for more content, which is helping improve the service and make it more appealing.

Hulu’s subscriber base has grown from 1 million users last summer and 1.5 million as of January. The service is expected to account for more than half of Hulu’s overall revenue later this year.

Hulu is also looking at improving the situation for advertisers by charging only for completed video advertisements. The standard used to be that advertisers were charged for any video ad that was streamed even if it wasn’t watched to completion. The completion rates for Hulu ads are already 96 percent, well ahead of the industry norm, so it’s not going to mean too much of a loss in volume. But the move helps advertisers get more comfortable with advertising on Hulu and addresses the 4 percent of advertisers who are still paying for ads that don’t get watched all the way through.

Kilar said the move is part of Hulu’s vision for the future of TV, in which ads will be even more relevant and personal for users and will support a higher fidelity conversation for advertisers.

Hulu says the premium service is attracting more than twice as many subs every day as it did this time last year when it was still new. One way it plans to keep that number growing: in addition to partner content, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says the company is committed to spending “approximately” a half-billion on content this year. Based on 1.5 million, that’s about $333 a subscriber. (He also continues to claim that Hulu pays content providers 50 percent more than its “similarly priced” competitors — i.e. Netflix.)

One way to put that into context: Hulu reports roughly $420 million in overall revenues for 2011, not quite the $500 million Kilar projected earlier this year. Another: the annualized revenue for 1.5 million subs at $7.99 a month is just under $144 million, less than a third of the amount being pledged for content. A little more context: even after subscribers left in droves following the Qwikster-price hike combo at Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), the veteran streaming service still has more than 21 million streaming subscribers in the U.S., about 14 times as many as Hulu Plus.

Hulu missed another half-billion milestone in 2011. That was the amount of revenue Kilar projected and reaffirmed during the year in similar posts. But he also left room for not quite hitting it, writing in July that Hulu was still on pact “to approach” $500 million in revenue.

Now that DVDs and streaming have been separated at Netflix, programming is the greatest distinction between Hulu Plus and its chief competitor. Netflix is known most for movies and back seasons of certain TV shows; it’s getting into original programming now. Hulu Plus is the place for current season access and this season, one of the only ways Fox (NSDQ: NWS) shows can be streamed within eight days of airing.

The numbers are included in Kilar’s latest blog post providing some of the details and color we might see if the joint venture of Disney (NYSE: DIS), News Corp. and NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Universal was a public company, rather than a private venture majority owned by public companies. It’s not nearly as complete but it does offer a glimpse into the way Kilar and the Hulu board gauge success or at least how they want it viewed in public.

It doesn’t carry the same weight as public company numbers, either. Imagine if Bob Iger told shareholders and analysts Disney would approach a certain number in revenue, then ended the year 16 percent short.

Kilar didn’t break out the numbers for Japan, where Hulu launched as a subscription service last September.

Of the seven years I’ve been writing about our namesake topic here at paidContent, 2011 is the hands-down winner when it comes people paying for digital content. The numbers aren’t all in yet and some of it will be hard to quantify given the lack of complete transparency but it’s clear that more people are willing to pay for digital access to music, news, movies, TV, games, books and magazines.

That doesn’t mean everyone is willing to pay cash for content and it doesn’t mean that every pay plan is working. It also doesn’t mean that there are more people willing to pay for content — some are swapping print or pay TV bills for digital editions and streaming. Others are taking advantage of subscriptions that have expanded to include multiple platforms: subscribe to the print New York Times, New Yorker or Sports Illustrated and get digital included. The quick adoption of tablets led by the iPad combined with app-based or app-like pay models and the expansion of e-readers with newsstands and cross-device platforms played key roles and will continue to do so. Ditto with expanded access to video online and online windowing changes that make subscriptions or downloads more attractive,

A few numbers to consider:

324,000: That’s the number of paying digital subs to NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) at the end of Q3, six months into first year of the paper’s metered paywall. Between digital-only subs, access for home-delivery subs and sponsored relationships like a deal with Lincoln, NYTimes.com claimed more than 1.2 million users had full access via digital. In a related note, home delivery circulation was up. It took digital subscription pioneer WSJ.com more than a year to hit 100,000 paying subs when it launched in the ’90s.

$5: Comedian Louis CK skipped the middle man for his latest special, producing it and then offering it directly to consumers for $5 a download earlier this month. He reported grossing $500,000 in the first four days and hitting $1 million in 12 days. The breakdown so far via Louis CK on his site: $250,000 to cover production and distribution costs — yes, that means he was in the black within days; $250,000 to his staff as a bonus; $280,000 to charity and $220,000 for him. Another kind of breakdown: 200,000 people were willing to pay. Left to be seen: will they pay the second time and a third or was this a lightening strike?

21.4 million: Amid the bad PR from its pricing and branding missteps and the fascination with its wilting stock price, it’s easy to miss one of the most important numbers from Netflix: at the end of Q3, it had more than 21.4 million subscribers for streaming and 13.9 million for DVD. The 23.8 million total was down due to a 60 percent increase in pricing for some subscribers when Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) split charges for streaming and DVD but the company had more than 4 million net adds year over year. It also expanded its streaming-only international footprint from Canada to Latin America. Whatever you think about Reed Hastings and the strategic blunders of 2011, getting 21 million people to pay $8 a month for streaming video access through Netflix has to be acknowledged.

1 million: Hulu Plus, the subscription video service from online video portal Hulu, was on target to hit 1 million paying subscribers this year. Meanwhile, subscription music service Rhapsody just announced it has hit 1 million paying subs. Granted, that would sound a lot more impressive if it hadn’t taken a decade to accomplish but it’s a sign of how much has changed since Rhapsody launched its subscription service. Ease of use across devices and platforms makes all the difference.

$48.8 billion: From Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and United Online (NSDQ: UNTD), the companies in our inaugural paidContent 50 accounted for an estimated nearly $50 billion in digital revenue. How much is from consumers paying directly for digital access or content? Impossible to say. But it’s safe to say both numbers are going up. It’s also safe to say that traditional media will continue to see more dollars move to digital access and that the full impact of that transition has yet to be felt.

Read the rest of the posts in our Highlights of 2011 archives.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that the Kindle Fire will have Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Rhapsody, Pandora (NYSE: P), Twitter, Facebook and Weather Channel apps, as well as games from Zynga, Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS), Gameloft (EPA: GFT), PopCap and Rovio. Amazon has not responded to my questions about how its Facebook and Twitter apps will work. As our reader Pat points out, Facebook apps normally include GPS, which neither the Kindle Fire nor the Nook Tablet supports.

For the Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble has announced Netflix (pre-loaded on the device), Hulu Plus, Pandora, Rhapsody, Grooveshark, MOG and games from Rovio and Electronic Arts, among others. Barnes & Noble did not answer my question this week about whether it will include standalone Twitter and Facebook apps.

The Kindle Fire’s app additions mean the Nook Tablet/Kindle Fire app lineups are now looking similar, with the streaming video advantage for Amazon because it also offers Prime Instant Video access from the Kindle Fire. That service is available to Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 per year for free two-day shipping; the Kindle Fire comes with a free one-month trial of Amazon Prime. (Hulu Plus and Netflix also require memberships to watch their content, of course: Hulu Plus is $7.99 per month, and Netflix memberships vary. Check out the differences between the services here.)

Neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon offers access to the Android Market; rather, each has its own app store. We can expect these app one-upping announcements to continue for awhile, but the fact remains that the Kindle Fire costs $50 less than the $249 Nook Tablet.