Why can't Google figure out how to make money off Hulu?
OpenHulu is the unauthorized website with all the Hulu videos embedded, allowing you to watch Fox and NBC TV shows even if you don't have an invite to the NBC/News Corp. service's private beta. After blog posts about the site hit the Digg front page yesterday, traffic spiked. Between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. today, OpenHulu saw 104,051 ad impressions, site operator Mazyar Kazerooni told me. So how well did Google AdSense do for the site?
Not very. Kazerooni and his partner Matt Schlicht earned a whopping $38, making the site's effective rate a bottom-of-the-barrel $0.37 CPM. But don't worry, Kazerooni tells us: "I got [Schlicht] to switch out Adsense with ValueClick." So much for the moneymaking potential of online video! Somehow, I don't think this was what NBC and News Corp. had in mind when they launched Hulu. Or what Google had hoped for YouTube.