Gawker: valleywag, openhulu

CAN HAS SCOBLE? DO WANT!

Jordan Golson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:20:41 EST

Matt Schlicht and Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni, the teenage minds behind OpenHulu, have created a lolcats-Robert Scoble mashup called LolScobles. What does Scoble think? "Just find a goofy image of me and go to lolScobles.com. Oh, boy. That shouldn't be too hard!" Thanks for being a good sport, Bobby!

OpenHulu getting hate mail, acquisition offers

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:20:46 EST

While NBC Universal and News Corp. keep Hulu, their online-video joint venture, under invitation-only wraps, OpenHulu, an independent website which appears to be legally embedding Hulu videos, is actually starting to earn some cash. Not only that, but it's getting a little attention from potential buyers, too. Not bad for just copying and pasting chunks of HTML code.

Site owner, operator and shameless promoter Matt Schlicht claims OpenHulu reached 100,000 unique visitors yesterday. That's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but that's not keeping the buyers away. Schlicht claims "three different big TV-links type sites have tried to buy OpenHulu." He wouldn't give me names, but said the interested parties get between 500,000 and 1 million unique visitors on their own sites each month. This despite the fact that there are other sites built on Hulu embeds there, such as TV Paradise, example.

All this good news must have you people itching for schadenfreude. Well, no worries. For some reason — did we mention he's a shameless self-promoter? — Schlicht is getting plenty hate mail to go along with the resumes and offer sheets. He was only too happy to share them with us. (Shameless? Check.)

Fuck you OpenHulu. You claim to be "open" but I'm here in australia and I can't even watch a god damn video. This better not be just as ausies or I'm going to fucking kick your ass. Why the hell would you do this? Why block out australia? Who the fuck are you to judge who can watch videos and who can't? I hate you fat american pigs.

Dear Matt, your site sucks. It doesnt even have old episodes...get a job. You take up too much air.

You're one of those freaking people who actually think up a good idea. Not just a good idea though, more like an idea thats stupid as fuck but it will get popular. An idea like million dollar homepage or selling pet rocks. You were at the right place right time my friend, you're nothing. Just a worthless piece of shit piggy backer.

You are an ass hole. And this site is completely illegal. Hulu is a great service that is simply going through beta and you are misusing your beta opportunity. People like you make me sick

Why can't Google figure out how to make money off Hulu?

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:00:37 EST

OpenHulu is the unauthorized website with all the Hulu videos embedded, allowing you to watch Fox and NBC TV shows even if you don't have an invite to the NBC/News Corp. service's private beta. After blog posts about the site hit the Digg front page yesterday, traffic spiked. Between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. today, OpenHulu saw 104,051 ad impressions, site operator Mazyar Kazerooni told me. So how well did Google AdSense do for the site?

Not very. Kazerooni and his partner Matt Schlicht earned a whopping $38, making the site's effective rate a bottom-of-the-barrel $0.37 CPM. But don't worry, Kazerooni tells us: "I got [Schlicht] to switch out Adsense with ValueClick." So much for the moneymaking potential of online video! Somehow, I don't think this was what NBC and News Corp. had in mind when they launched Hulu. Or what Google had hoped for YouTube.

Blogger opens Hulu to the masses

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:20:01 EST

NBC and News Corp.'s joint Web-video venture Hulu remains in an invitation-only beta. But if you can't wait to access "Conan the Barbarian" online, blogger Matt Schlicht has your workaround. It's called OpenHulu. It's full of embedded Hulu videos like Arrested Development clip below. Other than whatever cash he's earning from Google ads he runs on the site, why's Schlicht taking so much time to index Hulu's content? "It's mainly the satisfaction of sticking it to the man and bending the rules," Schlict tells Last100. Sticking it to The Man by promoting his ad-supported content on your site and stirring up as much enthusiasm for his product as possible. Yeah! That'll teach him!