Hulu About To Generate The Same Revenue As YouTube

Image via CrunchBase

An online research group released the results of a study comparing the revenues of YouTube and Hulu, with startling results. The company projects that both web video companies with generate the same amount of revenue by the end of 2009, even though Hulu has just a fraction of the audience of YouTube.

FT: YouTube, for which Google paid $1.65bn two years ago, is by some distance the most popular online video destination, with 83m unique viewers in the US in September, compared to Hulu’s 6m, according to market researcher Nielsen.

But Hulu’s advertising revenues are growing more quickly, according to Screen Digest, a digital media research group.

Neither company breaks out its advertising revenues but Arash Amel, analyst at Screen Digest, forecasts that in 2008 YouTube will generate about $100m in the US, compared with about $70m at Hulu. Next year both sites will generate about $180m in the US, he says. YouTube currently earns around half of its revenues in the US, while Hulu has not yet launched internationally.

The article doesn’t describe how Screen Digest makes its predictions or projections. I would assume they find out from clients the average rate of an ad and do calculations from there. However, they might have missed the potential for YouTube to capitalize on its massive search queries.

Last week at Alley Insider, they pointed out that YouTube had 8.8 billion searches in September. If it can properly monetize those searches, it could be a $1 billion business. If anyone can monetize search, it’s Google. But as we’ve seen repeatedly, web video is a tough business. And even with all this revenue, it’s not clear that either company is profitable.