Hulu (News - Alert).com, online television for the masses and with minimal commercials in-between has been chosen today as been picked as this year’s Wed site of the year.

 

"This is period of great experimentation in regard to media, in regard to online video," said Hulu chief executive officer Jason Kilar (News - Alert) in a recent interview. "You've seen a lot, you're probably going to see even more in terms of various business models, various interface designs. I personally love to operate in moments of time like that."

 

Hulu officially launched on March 12, a result of collaborations between News Corp. and NBC Universal (News - Alert). The collaboration wasn’t taken seriously at first because it was thought to fail, miserably.

 

The blogosphere was, to say the least, doubtful of the collaboration, according to the Associated Press. Before its name was announced, bloggers derided the project as "Clown Co."

 

"Boy, did we have to eat crow," recently wrote Michael Arrington of the influential blog Techcrunch.com. "I was wrong. Hulu rocks. Despite ridiculous odds, the company was able to pull of a joint venture between two humongous parent media companies and provides users with a compelling, sexy product."

 

Hulu hosts more than 1,000 shows, from "Family Guy" to "Saturday Night Live." There are more than 130 content providers, not only NBC and Fox, but Sony Pictures Television, MGM Studios, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures (News - Alert) and PBS.

 

ComScore recorded its unique monthly visitors for October at 24 million. On average, a visitor watches 10 videos on Hulu in a month, which is good enough to chart Hulu sixth in videos viewed online.

 

Although, Hulu declines to share revenue figures, they say they finished above internal estimates for the year and many believe Hulu is more appealing to advertisers than YouTube (News - Alert), and that Hulu's ad revenues could equal YouTube's by the end of 2009.

 

"The whole tenor of the conversation is markedly different, in terms of folks like Sony and MGM and Warner Bros. really coming on board once they realized what it was we were building," said Kilar.

 

One of the year's biggest hits for Hulu this year was Joss Whedon's three-part musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog.” "SNL" clips were enormously popular online thanks to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression.

 

"Based on the folks that are working with us today, the response I get is what Hulu is delivering for them ... much more than they ever thought it would do in 2008," said Kilar. "We're quite bullish about where this goes."

 

Interesting is what shows are most popular on Hulu. "Heroes" and "House," for example, rank below cult comedies "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (FX) and "Arrested Development," which was sadly canceled by Fox in 2006.

 

"It's a great theoretical: If `Arrested Development' were on the air today, would they have canceled it?" wonders Kilar. "My own personal opinion is no, given the fact it's our second-most popular show of all time."

 

Next year, Hulu hopes to expand internationally. Rights issues — often different by country — have made such expansion a thorny prospect. Kilar also hopes to make Hulu more broadly syndicated across the Web.