Apparently, advertising to the general public helped NBC Universal’s Hulu.com to attract more visitors - increased by 33%. This growth shot their number of video views to 309 million making them the no. 2 video website in the United States.

What else is new with them?

Option to watch a video commercial-free:

They seem to be piliot-testing a new option for users to view an extended commercial before the video begins and enjoy the rest of the TV show commercial-free. This essentially removes the ‘interruptive’ element prevelant in TV (and Hulu as well) advertising. But, from the perspective of the advertiser this may not seem a great value proposition. .A user can easily mute his computer for a couple of minutes and then get back to the video to watch it commercial-free. The likelihood of someone watching the commercial is more if the user watches the video with nomal commercial breaks.

Hulu goes social

Hulu.com realizes the importance to be a part of the social networking web-space. You can now add your friends from Facebook, MySpace and other networks. This also lets you share what you saw on Hulu.com with everyone in your network. Creating a community around their brand could go a long way.

Recommendations

Still in ‘beta’, this feature recommends you shows depending on your interests and your past activities on Hulu. Not sure what is the basis of determining this. I tested it out with my account and it picked up some videos from the ‘Comedy’ channel. I usually watch ‘Comedy’ shows and have never seen anything else on Hulu so it seems to be one fair reason for having recommended those videos.

Are you on Hulu.com a lot yourself? Add me to your network: