The fickle issue of web revenues

Truck and Barter posts about the income of web video delivery, in particular about a company called HULU.

This implies 300M vids served in Jan 2009, and an average increase in 50M every month through 2009. An average of 600M per month over 12 months is 7.2B videos. $100M/7200M implies 1.3 cents of revenue per video served. If 50% is shared with owners, we're talking about 0.65 cents per vid served. Wow.

Web companies take advantage of web capability and use the web to round up lots of customers for cheap video. The video producer is then stuck with a system that, temporarily, controls a huge chunk of customers. The video producers end up with a pittance, as does the web company. But the video producer made a film, the web company put up a web site.

This condition is temporary, because HULU will be replaced by a protocol that lets every video viewer look directly into the video producer servers, bypassing the web company. The streamlined process embeds the web into the producers business, and the video producer ends up buying great software tools for film making, and they control their own delivery, the public protocol providing a common customer interface.