Something’s wrong with YouTube, and it looks like Hulu stands to benefit. YouTube, as you’re all painfully aware, is primarily comprised of short videos of guys falling off their skateboards (embedded here), dudes playing video game songs on the piano and illegal Seinfeld clips. Those types of videos aren’t attractive to advertisers. That may explain why YouTube, which had 83 million unique hits in September, is only expected to generate $100 million for the year.
Compare that to Hulu, which primarily consists of professionally made NBC and Fox shows and clips—I just wasted quite a few minutes watching a few “popular” Simpsons clips, for example. That all of the content there is nice and legal makes it more appealing to advertisers, which explains why, even though with only 6 million hits in September, Hulu is expected to generate to $70m.
Both sites are expected to generate $180 million next year. Don’t think that’s because, overnight, Hulu increases its viewership 10-fold.
In other words, people (“analysts” and the like) are now wondering how, if ever, will Google will turn YouTube into a monetary success.
Don’t forget that Google paid $1.65 billion for the site two years ago—that’s a lot of skateboarding videos for which to sell ads.