Nielsen has released its VideoCensus rankings of the top online video sites for July, and it looks like long-tail television site Hulu is the company to watch.

In July, Hulu’s traffic grew to 105 million streams per month, and the site leapfrogged several competitors to become eighth most popular vide site. Not bad for a site that’s only been live for five months.

Hulu Close To Overtaking YouTube

What’s really amazing about Hulu, though, is that, at least in one respect, it’s close to overtaking YouTube.

While Hulu only has about 2% of YouTube’s traffic, it can and does put advertising on all of its videos.

YouTube, on the other hand, can only put ads on a tiny fraction of its content. According to YouTube sales manager Brian Cusack, YouTube is able to sell ads against less than 3% of the total videos on the site.

So, while Hulu is a long way from overtaking YouTube’s traffic, it’s already close to beating YouTube in the number of video streams that it can actually make money on.

This trend is likely to have a huge long-term effect on video sites and the future of user-generated video.

Here’s Nielsen’s VideoCensus breakdown:

via Michael Learmonth