Chalk this up to smart social marketing. An editor at Hulu emailed Reddit, offering its users (called “redditors”) to edit the “featured content” section of the home page for a day by voting up their favorite clips.
“We weren’t expecting much of a response out of it. We just like Reddit,” explains Ben Collins, assistant editor at Hulu. “Two days, 5,210 upvotes, and 2,069 karma points for Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ later, we’re blown away.”
That’s right, a Carl Sagan clip won the voting, and today it’s featured on Hulu’s home page (lower right). The rest of top 10 clips were assembled into a playlist featuring the likes of Arrested Development and Mystery Science Theater. Each of the playlist clips credits the redditor who suggested it.
Redditors seemed to love it — except those outside the U.S. who can’t get Hulu — and given the thousands of upvotes and comments, you can bet Reddit sent the video site a fair amount of traffic. Brilliant.