Hulu Ad Revenue To Rival YouTube

Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 11:33

Hulu, an online video site featuring only professional content, is on track to surpass YouTube in terms of advertising revenue.

While YouTube has far more traffic than Hulu, with 83 million unique visitors in the U.S. in September, compared to Hulu’s six million, according to Nielsen.

Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal will generate about $70 million in U.S. ad revenue in 2008 while YouTube will generate about $100 million, according to Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel.

In 2009 both sites will generate about $180 million in the US., according to Amel’s forecast. YouTube earns about half of its revenue in the U.S., while Hulu has not yet launched globally. Neither company discloses its advertising revenue.

Hulu has been able to grow rapidly because of its understanding of the Internet business. “They’ve taken the essential understanding of the disaggregated Web and they’ve applied it to professional programming, and they’re making money,” Amel told C21.

Hulu is appealing to advertisers because their ads appear next to professional content, compared to YouTube, which mainly features user-generated content.

Amel is critical of YouTube saying that most of the user-generated content is worthless or illegal. He predicted that the next year and a half will determine if Google made an “expensive mistake,” by purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.