John Borkowski, September 8, 2011
Hulu, a joint venture owned by NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment, and Disney-ABC, offers ad-supported on demand videos of TV episodes and movies. They’ve been accepting bids for a purchase since the beginning of 2011. News released yesterday shows that Google has most recently made a significant bid for the purchase of the company. Other bidding offers came from Yahoo!, Amazon, and Dish Network. It should be noted that Yahoo! was the first company to contact them about a potential buy.
Ad-supported content has made a big push this year (on reputable sites, including search engines), as Google released figures that clearly show PPC is a booming service for online marketing firms.
Hulu is not guaranteed to sell, although the joint partners that own the service are obviously interested in accepting offers. The company confirmed that bidding ended in late August. This may just be a way for the partners to see how valuable their service firm is, or there may be larger deals at show here, including if Google purchases them.
Google is believed to have offered a significant amount of higher cash for the deal because they also want to receive licensing for the subscriptions.
If Google does, in fact, purchase the company, for $1.5 - $2.5 billion (the range of offers reported thus far), they will most likely implement their ad campaigns to the videos, thus the more reason to look for the best ppc company. This may be a larger state and an additional outlet for Google ads to be broadcasted, a potential opportunity for advertisers and search marketers.
