Hulu Bigger Than YouTube?

Have you seen Live Rail's State of the [Online Video] Industry report? A piece in ReadWriteWeb alerted me to it, and the findings are pretty fascinating. You can download the whole report here.

But here are some of the highlights (text from the report):

Online Video Advertising Spend To Grow >55% Next Year
- US Online video advertising spending expected to hit $962m in 2009
- Confusing array of technology and ad-unit standards constraining current
growth rates
- Video ad spending still represents just 2.36% of all online advertising
- Average In-Stream CPMs reach $15.8
- In-Stream (pre/mid/post roll) still representing 88% of all video ads
- 20.95% of internet video streams being monetized
- Video Publishers generating an effective monetization rate of $4.05 per
thousand streams

And check out dis little tidbit:

THE RISE AND RISE OF HULU

Despite still being substantially smaller than YouTube, with 88 million videos served
compared to YouTube’s 4.2 billion, analysts are now beginning to suggest that Hulu
will be the more successful business, thanks to its ability to sell advertising across 100% of its inventory, compared to just 3% for YouTube.

This is thanks to its policy of only serving high-quality original content, and securing licensing deals from content owners, rather than allowing users to upload the content themselves. This has removed the risk of copyright infringing content, or content of questionable quality; risk factors that most advertisers are anxious to avoid being associated with.

According to one estimate, Hulu could enjoy $90 million in revenue in its first year.
YouTube’s estimated worldwide revenue total for 2008 is $200 million this year, but is estimated to be approximately half that domestically. Given that Hulu caters almost exclusively to a US audience, both YouTube and Hulu could see roughly the same
revenues in the U.S. this year.

Quality matters.

Lots more juicy bots of real orange in this report. Go get it people!