TechCrunch posted an interesting article comparing Hulu and YouTube.
Can Hulu Be A Bigger Business Than YouTube?
You can find interesting numbers in it.
Hulu may not size up well against YouTube – in May 2008, Hulu served about 88 million videos compared to YouTube’s 4.2 billion videos – but it has the luxury of monetizing the vast majority of its videos instead of the three percent
that YouTube can sell ads against. Three percent of 4.2 billion is 126 million videos a month that can carry ads—not much more than Hulu.
That pretty much levels the playing field in terms of revenue and profit potential. According to one estimate
Despite the huge difference in video views, the sizes of the business measured in ad revenue are almost the same, in this estimate.
First, I strongly believe that as far as the business goes, the mainstream content like Hulu or live sports is king. So when I read that Hulu’s estimated revenue number is not very different from that of YouTube’s, I was not really surprised.
On the other hand, the power of UGC (user generated content) on the internet has really been significant for years. So what’s the problem here? One fundamental problem, as I see it, is that people enjoys it but doesn’t really care it as they do for the mainstream content. Which makes each piece of content not very attractive for advertisers.
I hope to see solutions when we can change the way people find and consume content. One such possibility is video search. Just like web search made web pages into gold mine of valuable information, video search can make online video into something more useful than just entertainment. Then there is room for more advertisement, with higher value for advertisers.
I am really looking forward to seeing the increased revenue numbers for the mainstream and UGC.
