Hulu Whoop

The comScore figures for October online-video viewing are out, and it's not exactly good news for Google. At first, the search company looks like it's doing just fine. YouTube racked up 100 million unique American viewers in October, a staggering figure by any measure. Almost 40 percent of 13.5 billion online videos watched that month were delivered by Google. YouTube is without a doubt still the most dominant Internet video site in the country. Where, exactly, is the bad news?

Here's where: Earlier this year, Hulu, the movie and television Web site put out by News Corp. and NBC, didn't exist. Now, it has almost 24 million unique viewers, a quarter of what YouTube can boast. What's more, those viewers watch for an average of 11.6 minutes, compared with the average three-minute viewing time overall. Hulu is coming up fast on YouTube's flank. What's more, Hulu is easy to navigate—it's easy to find videos you want to watch on the site—unlike YouTube's sprawling architecture. The videos are all professionally made movies and TV shows, luring advertisers put off by the amateur feel of so many of YouTube's offerings. And while Hollywood studios are either terrified of or angry at Google (see Viacom, lawsuit filed by), Hulu is Hollywood. Google's execs, who have struggled to find a way to make YouTube pay off since buying it for $1.6 billion, would be remarkably stupid not to notice this headache. And Google isn't known for being stupid.

Longtime tech journo Kara Swisher has been impressed with Hulu for quite some time, and she recently popped over to the company's headquarters to talk with CEO Jason Kilar. The video she shot can be a little much ("I think that should be your motto: a brain-spray of awesome. Really cool!"), but she eventually gets around to asking a couple of questions. Watch it here.

More Like This: This isn't the first time Hulu has changed YouTube's strategy, as Chris Thompson noted in November. Chadwick Matlin chronicled the profit-potential of another web wunderkind, Twitter. YouTube Brandwatch polls readers about the brand impact of viral videos.