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"I'm honestly having a hard time knowing where to begin in refuting the latest missive from Mark Cuban over at BlogMaverick.  On the one hand, it is hard to argue with a guy who's a billionaire at his age.  He obviously knows a few things about how to run a business, particularly when it comes to online and rich media.\nMark has some interesting things to say regarding Hulu's dominance, in his mind, over YouTube.  Its hard to argue with them if you don't stop to look at the underlying data or extenuating circumstances.  Essentially what he's saying comes down to two points.  I'll paraphrase:\n\"One area in which Hulu is just stomping up and down YouTube.\" Hulu doesn't have pesky copyright infringement problems, so they can safely monetize their entire inventory, unlike YouTube.\n\"Another area in which Hulu is laughing at YouTube all the way to bank.\" Hulu uses YouTube as a mode of free advertisement and traffic generation by posting teasers and shorts as a way to promote the longer, full episode at Hulu.\nThe problem here is that the enormous scale of YouTube's traffic dwarfs the total amount of revenues generated by Hulu. YouTube has been playing around with some, let's be honest, woefully ineffective forms of video monetization.  Taking a look at this Compete chart that shows the two sites' traffic relative to one another should clear up the point I'm trying to make.\n\nThe numbers look something like this (since the scale makes it very difficult to see).\nScore so far? YouTube : 58 million :: Hulu : 1.1 million.\nRemember, these are raw people counts, not pageviews.  Take those numbers and multiply them by the pageviews per average visitor and the gap widens further.\n\nYouTube gets an average of 15.7 pages out of each visitor, while Hulu has recently jumped up to around 6.6 per visitor.  Let's be generous and round both of those numbers up.\nScore so far? YouTube : 928 million :: Hulu : 6.6 million.\n\nFor YouTube to even start to get worried about Hulu kicking their ass, Hulu would need to start monetizing their content at rates almost exactly 140 times higher than whatever they're currently charging before a dent in the market is made enough for YouTube to notice (that, of course, assumes that the market would sustain such a gargantuan rate hike, which it wouldn't).\nConversely, to completely dominate Hulu in terms of revenues, YouTube would need to monetize substantially less than 1% of their traffic.\nDoes this mean that either company is in any way profitable?  Not in the slightest. Hulu pushes out video at much higher bitrates for much longer than YouTube does, with the added expense of having to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the production of said video.  Meanwhile, as we talked about last week, YouTube simply conscripts the willing monkeys of the world to do everything for free, and in some cases, pay them money for doing work.\nAs I went into great detail describing at Hulu's launch, they don't have the first clue as to how to effectively create a destination site that rivals any of the destination sites on the Internet when it comes to video. YouTube has that market sewn up.\nWhat YouTube embarrassingly lacks is the ability to come up with a business plan that works. Until either company can figure out what they're doing, they'll both continue to kick their own asses.\nOne thing is for certain - when it comes to YouTube's ass, Hulu couldn't find it with both hands."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/06/19/youtube-hulu/>