Hulu Economics

Ah, the blogosphere, where analysis and wild speculation go hand in hand. Remember the late 90s when analysts pumped up worthless internet stocks for brokerage firms? Now those guys have a new home. If I was one of the many recently laid-off investment professionals out there, a blog would be one of the first places I’d look for employment. Where else can you make wild unsubstantiated speculations and be read by thousands with no risk of repercussions?

The Financial Times has the early scoop on a forthcoming report from Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel who predicts that Hulu revenues will grow from $70 million this year to $180 million in 2009, about the same amount of revenue he forecasts for YouTube.

Peter Kafka follows up with Amel who says that Hulu is probably already generating a gross profit. Further, “Amel thinks YouTube is paying more for those fees than it does for infrastructure/bandwidth.” Where he comes up with this I have no idea, nor do I believe it, but we’ll need to wait for the report which may or more likely may not have real numbers to know for sure.

And leave it to Henry Blodget, while an analyst at Merrill one of the leaders of 90s irrational exuberance, now in the perfect role at Alley Insider to weigh in with his own speculation, though at least time it’s more on the side of reason.

I will admit that it’s interesting reading, I’m as curious as the next guy to know how well these Hulu and YouTube are really doing and how far they are from a profitable model, but the latest “news” on Hulu is the more in a long list of posts based on nothing.

But apparently it gets readers, so at the least blogs wildly speculating on revenue are generating revenue. Anyone care to take a stab at Insider’s share of AlleyCorp’s revenue?