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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.

Hulu: No Respect; Loads of Content

Big shock! The blogosphere hates the new name of the new NBC / News Corp. YouTube competitor, Hulu.

Why? Well apparently Hulu means “butt” in Malay and Indonesian and “cease” and “desist” in Swahili. OMG!111!11

You have no idea how many times my friends and I talk about funny videos we’ve seen in Swahili. As soon as Hulu launches these conversations are sure to get awkward.

But the bottom line is if Hulu comes out with a stable service that is easy to use people will start respecting them real quick. Here are a few simple reasons:

Saturday Night Live
Family Guy
The Simpsons
The Tonight Show
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Heroes
30 Rock

People want to see clips of these shows. Look at these Family Guy clips. Or these clips from SNL. They have view counts in the millions. Content is king and Hulu will have TONS of it. It's never a good idea to dismiss a competitor with so many weapons in their arsenal.

Grouper Offering Revenue Sharing

Sony owned Grouper.com is offering revenue sharing to content producers in exchange to exclusive rights to stream their work. I don’t know if this offer is being extended to all producers on Grouper but my sketch comedy group got an invitation yesterday.

The payment structure looks like this:

             

Streams   (per Submission)	Incremental   Payments ($US)
50,000-100,000	150
100,000-149,999	150
150,000-199,999	150
200,000-299,999	200
300,000-399,999	200
Each 100,000   thereafter, up to 5 million	100

Note that the payments only kick in if an individual video reaches 50,000+ streams. Not the entire account of videos. Metacafe’s payment structure is similar.

If these sites are serious about gaining market share on YouTube they need to make the prospect of getting paid more attainable by offering account-wide payment benchmarks. They are asking producers to give up an awful lot of exposure by shunning YouTube, MySpace and others.

Google Results Integrate Video Thumbnails from Competitors

It appears that Google is integrating thumbnails of videos in its search results but not just from Google-owned properties like YouTube.

I was going through my traffic logs for my sketch comedy group and found Google supplied a thumbnail and direct link to one of our videos on MySpace.

Google could simply use this feature on YouTube videos giving them a huge clickthru advantage but they’re choosing not to. According to WebTVWire Google is also providing thumbnails for videos on Yahoo Video, MetaCafe, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Vimeo.

It’s a smart move, one that truly speaks to Google's mission of organizing the world’s information.

Presidential Candidates Stealing Content on YouTube

The posting of copyrighted material has been a big problem for YouTube in the past. Now some of the highest profile users are posting illegal content: The presidential candidates!

Of the Democratic front runners Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards only Obama has illegal content in this account – an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC.

The leading Republicans however are a different story. Of Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain and Mayor Rudy Giuliani only Giuliani doesn’t have copyrighted materials.

While McCain has clips from the Today Show,  CNN and FOX News but Romney is the big offender.

Romney has content from all over including FOX News, 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC and even CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman.

So what will YouTube do? It's one thing to ban a teenager's account for posting Daily Show clips it is quite another to try to boss around a possible future President of the United States.

MySpace Continuing Transition to Portal

This morning MySpace launched MySpace News which scans leading news sources and allows MySpace users to vote on stories which determines what reaches the front page. It’s powered by NewRoo a company they acquired last year. Techcrunch has more coverage here.

It’s a great new feature to the site and another step from “popular online hangout” to “full fledged portal”. I wonder how long it will take for the mainstream media, and companies like Yahoo!, MSN and Google, to figure out that’s what MySpace is doing.

Or maybe they do know and just don't care. I know MySpace users have a certain stigma but it will be interesting to see what they do as they get older. Will they abandon it or will MySpace be considered a defacto site everyone is a part of? With its user base continuing to grow it would be a mistake to underestimate MySpace.

New Post over at Search Engine Journal

Hey guys! I have a new post about CBS' viral efforts for their sitcom How I Met Your Mother over at Search Engine Journal.

Don't Underestimate NBC and News Corp.

After failing to reach deals with Google-owned YouTube, NBC and News Corp (along with Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo!) are building their own video sharing site.

Many people are writing this off as a bunch of slow old media companies lumbering onto the internet in an effort to take on the King of Online Video. Of course they’re right. BUT it would be presumptuous to count them out based on that alone. Google seems to be doing that already by referring to this initiative as “Clown Co.”.

That’s a mistake. There are two key things NBC/News’ site must do to make an impact on YouTube – have exclusive content and provide a simple, easy user experience that works properly.

It’s no easy task but if they can make a site that makes it easy to share, embed and stream content they could make a significant mark in the online video arena.