So I’m still hearing dark muttering out of Camp General Electric, which indirectly owns Hulu, that they need to start making people PAY for this stuff.  But they’re considering a whole lot of different plans, including one I actually suggested a few months back.

After reading Chris’s piece over the concept, my own idea suddenly took on a stark new importance.  Why is Hulu not getting more involved with advertising if it wants to boost its revenues?  They’re talking in that direction, but nowhere near as aggressively as they should.

“I know [Hulu is] looking at any number of things, like adding inventory (more advertising) or creating a subscription model with different windows.”

More advertising.  That’s your ticket right there.  Frankly, I’ve long believed that internet advertising models are WILDLY divorced from reality.  Pay per click?  Excuse me?  No.  You don’t pay a newspaper or a magazine or a TV station based on the number of people who come into the store after the ad.  No. You pay a RATE based on viewership numbers.  Higher the viewers, higher the ad bill.  You don’t like the results, you go elsewhere AFTER you cut the check.

But Hulu’s pretty popular as it sits.  If it can present more ads, or bigger ads, to the wide audience that shows up for free Hulu TV, well, then why not?  There’s how you make your money.  And if a big name like Hulu can help lead Internet advertising AWAY from the pay-per-click model and into a model more in line with the rest of the advertising industry, then what we have here is a whole new paradigm.  Frankly, the world is moving to the Internet anyway–newspapers are shutting their doors, magazines are fleeing to their web sites and dumping their paper equivalents, Kindle is the new bookstore.

Let’s get Internet advertising to a respectable state for all web sites.