SocialNext

Hulu Advertising on YouTube for Free

Hulu, the NBC / News Corp. YouTube competitor hasn’t been the train wreck many have expected. In fact, it’s a pretty darn good site with, you guessed it, loads of great content.

Interestingly enough Hulu has figured out how to advertise on YouTube for free. They’ve started a free account and uploaded many popular videos (like this one for example) that were pulled off YouTube in the past plus new clips from popular shows like Family Guy. Plus, they’ve added a scrolling ticker below the video that explains what Hulu is and how to use it.

The entire ticker reads (and repeats itself during the video):

Introducing Hulu.com, a premium video site. At Hulu.com, you can watch video like this one, for free. Hulu offers full episodes of current hit shows 30 Rock, House, Family Guy, The Office, to classic shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hundreds more TV episodes, movies and clips. Visit Hulu.com and start watching now. For Free.

This tactic seems to be working too. As of this writing, they’re in the Top 100 Most Viewed in the Directors category on YouTube and their traffic continues to grow.

YouTube Insight Trending in the Right Direction

Two of YouTube's biggest weaknesses are customer service and video tracking. It’s hasn’t been lost on me that FunnyorDie had superior video tracking than Google-owned YouTube.

Now YouTube has launched Insight which gives video producers data on views, referral information and more. As a data junkie I love it but where’s the combined results at the account level?

I’d love to see Insight for my entire account: ranking my videos by popularity, overall view stats and trends. What about the benchmark feature they just added to Google Analytics? It would be cool to see how my view counts compare to the average account in my category. Plus it would be great to be able to have the option to download it into Excel.

Regardless Insight is a great first step and I can’t wait for it to be expanded even more!

Can a YouTube Competitor Land Perez Hilton?

Last December YouTube suspended popular gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s account. Perez had one of the most popular YouTube channels and participated in their “Partner Program”.

YouTube was slow to get a straight answer to Perez as to why his account was suspended and, justifiably, he was pretty darn mad. The result was Perez ditching YouTube for his own streaming video setup, PerezTV.

YouTube's lack of customer service (even for Partner participants!) is their Achilles Heel and resulted in a big fish getting away. The bottom line is this is a huge missed opportunity for a second-tier video site like Veoh, LiveVideo or Metacafe. They could have gained massive publicity from a pop culture trend setter and seen a huge jump in usage and accounts.

The opportunity is still there. Perez doesn’t seem to be monetizing PerezTV yet and if offered a sweetheart revenue sharing deal could still change over to a hosted platform.