What started out as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corporation, as a rival to Youtube with a strange name, is turning out to be quite a force in the world of online entertainment.
Last year, the yet-to-be-named company was already thought of in the Internet industry as almost a joke. The attitude seemed to be that only two networks starting it, NBC Universal and News Corp, was not enough to get it off the ground and that they had no experience building sites or applications. Also, how were they possibly going to compete with Youtube. Well, a lot can happen in a year…
With over 100 content providers, a net profit of $12 million, and forecasts of $70 million in ad revenue in 2008 by Arash Amel (analyst at Screen Digest), Youtube better watch out. What’s amazing is that, with numbers for Youtube being 83M unique viewers compared to 6M for Hulu in September (according to Nielsen reports), Amel still forecasts that both sites will generate about $180M in the US next year.
Youtube will always be the top destination for user-generated video content. However, for Advertisers that prefer associating products with well-known entertainment brands, Hulu is the place to do it. Pssst, watch out cable tv…
Hulu, a Los Angeles based company, was founded in March 2007, raised $100 million in financing by Providence Equity Partners in August 2007, and went live in March 2008.
