Comments from the Hulu Chief
Posted by melting on Apr 29, 2009
Jason Kilar recently made an apearance on Tech Ticker sitting in an interview with Sarah Lacy, a well know technology reporter. This three part series shed a little insight into Hulu’s balance between the users, the content creators, and the advertisors.
One could argue the only customer in the equation is the advertisers since they are buying the product. The advertisers are paying for the eyeballs of millions of viewers. Along these lines Jason discussed about his high CPM rate over traditional TV broadcasts. Hulu seems to be going where few startups these days are, and that is tackling monetization from the start. Jason likens Hulu to that of early TV shows that have a lower ratio of ad time to content. Hulu certainly is in a dance to please advertisers as well as users and content providers.
As far as users are concerned there were a few items that Jason could did not divulge. Many in the tech industry are hoping for a wonderful iPhone app. This could likely be a challenge due to the lack of a flash plugin or available API on the iPhone. As an aside, Jason please create this iPhone app and leak the story to me 
Finally, though Jason did not talk directly about how his investors (Fox and NBC) are viewing his product, but didn’t seem to show signs of tension.
YouTube, getting paid
Posted by melting on Jun 1, 2008
Even though YouTube has only been around for about three years there has been longtime speculation on if they will ever make money. Advertising on YouTube has had very minimal success with many differing problems. Advertisers aren’t used to user generated content that some of their customers may find offensive. Users tend to balk when they get overcrowded by advertising and navigate away from the site.
Forbes’ article bring very vague numbers which in and of themselves are not very interesting. Much like this article, they don’t really site where they get the information or how they draw there conclusions. The numbers sure can be very dismal. YouTube has had tremendous growth and is almost ubiquitous for certain types of video. The article points to data that 30% on internet videos are served by YouTube, yet they will only get 15% of the targeted 775 million this year and 1.35 billion next year in online video advertising revenues.
These numbers are telling of the current viewership of this type of business. 350 million and growth of 75% aren’t bad and will soon prove to be enough for Google to be right in purchasing YouTube. But if I could guess I think 3 things will improve the monetization of YouTube. Channel growth will continue to grow. Advertising on pages particular to individuals will grow because advertisers will continue to get used to how to monetize user information. Lastly Google will increase revenues by leaning on its true business, search.
Search for videos will help twofold. First is using the tradition Google search page will get its traditional pages. Where search can improve is when their users click YouTube from the “more” section it only takes you to the YouTube homepage. Better monetization of YouTube via search will be key.
Thanks again to TechCrunch for linking to a nice article by Forbes.
