Slapping Down YouTube and Hulu

Doug Mohney — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:38:16 -0400

TheStreet.com says that if you could take YouTube's audience and mix it with Hulu's ability to generate revenue, you'd be able to make some serious money. But that hasn't happened, so the two companies have been taken to task, each for not having the assets the other one does.

YouTube pulled 67.8 million unique viewers in May and served up 3.84 billion streams, dominating Nielson Online's numbers. Hulu only had 2.7 unique visitors and 80 million streams. However, it's not size but money that counts, specifically Hulu's ability to generate ad revenue while Google executives admit they are still looking for ways to monetize their online video mountain.

On the other hand, Hulu doesn't currently have the reach YouTube has or brand recognition, so it can't charge prime rates for video ads. YouTube's user generated video is of variable quality and could contain objectionable material, the sort of thing advertisers aren't going to support. There's also so much video posted on YouTube that Google doesn't have the resources to look through them all to find the ones that could fit within an advertiser's campaign.

Google is introducing better tools to track video metrics and let advertisers know when a video is about to "go viral" by measuring factors like the acceleration of views, favorites and rating activities. Hulu gets good marks for providing an ad selector to let viewers pick the ads they want

For more:
- TheStreet.com poo-poos YouTube and Hulu business models

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Slapping Down YouTube and Hulu