Hulu High-Fiving Its Rocketing Growth (While YouTube Falters to Only 5 Billion Monthly Streams?)

Hulu, major/"traditional" media's effort to capitalize on the massive growth in online video viewing, continues to surprise ... in a very positive way.  Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. (Fox).  And, while many bet against its chances of success, Hulu has so far found a winning formula -- featuring high quality and professionally produced (TV) content rather than videos of talking dogs.  As an example, Hulu is the place to view -- legitimately -- full episodes of Comedy Central's "The Jon Stewart Show" (again, remember to set your DVR's for tonight's Jim Cramer v. Jon Stewart battle royale ... although the winner already is pre-ordained).

While other video sites -- including the mother of them all, YouTube -- posted significant drops in total usage/viewing (YouTube down a whopping 11.2% from the previous month), Hulu rocketed upward 32.9%!  (Of course, to be fair, YouTube totaled 5.16 BILLION -- with a capital "B" -- streams for the month period ending February 9, whereas Hulu's total was 309 million streams).  Nonetheless, impressive -- very.  And, Hulu is now easily the #2 video streaming site.

Is this a one-time aberration?  Don't think so.  Hulu is now -- for the first time -- being talked about in the mainstream.  And, its advertising model is significantly more interesting at this point, precisely because its video content is different from YouTube and others -- i.e., advertisers are much more willing to pay top dollar for "The Jon Stewart Show" than skateboarding dogs (although that YouTube video is hilarious).

And, just today, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, Hulu is aiming its sites directly on the world of social network by introducing Facebook-type features.

If I am any indicator of Hulu's success, I have posted back-to-back stories prominently mentioning Hulu in the past two days ...