Hulu Named Web Site of the Year

The AP’s Jake Coyle crowns Hulu the Web site of the year. The NBCU – News Corp. joint venture was named best site after overcoming doubters including Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington: “Boy, did we have to eat crow. I was wrong. Hulu rocks,” Arrington wrote. ComScore ranks Hulu as the sixth most-viewed video site on the Web garnering about 2% of the online video market. But, Coyle writes:

[M]any believe Hulu is more appealing to advertisers than YouTube, and that Hulu’s ad revenues could equal YouTube’s by the end of 2009. (Hulu declines to share revenue figures, but says they finished above internal estimates for the year.)

Meanwhile, AdAge reports Hulu’s unique viewers dropped from October to November — from 9 million to 7.5 million.

Unique viewers aside, there’s still good news for Hulu: Even without Sarah Palin, total viewing on the site is way up. The site served just more than 220 million video streams in November, up 7% from 206 million in October. Those numbers make Hulu the No. 3 video site in the U.S. And it’s closing in fast on No. 2 Fox Interactive Media, with 243 million streams.

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