Spotted: Hulu.com reached an all-time high last month attracting 38.1 million unique visitors, according to Web traffic analyst comScore Inc. That probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been sucked into the site, which offers free viewing of TV shows and movies. Average visitors spent 1 hour and 13 minutes each visit, watching 12 videos.

Silicon Alley Insider compared the new numbers to the video subscribers of cable TV companies. Guess who has fewer subscribers? Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second -largest cable provider with 34 million customers. Writes Silicon Alley Insider:

What does this mean? Not much, yet. Obviously, cable companies are still bringing in vastly more revenue than Hulu, and remain more important to the networks whose shows appear on either platform.

But Hulu is increasingly making a strong case that it could be the video platform for the future — if it can ever create nearly as much revenue for content producers as cable companies do today.

Silicon Alley Insider also noted that Comcast and DirecTV have more subscribers than Time Warner.

Fast Company chimes in, noting that Hulu’s big hurdle is getting advertising. At 12 shows within 73 minutes, that’s 12 six-minute shows. Hulu doesn’t appear to have viewers loyal enough to the same TV shows to support the historic advertising model of the TV world, concludes Fast Company.

And since millions of repeat viewers is the meat and drink of advertising companies, it means the majority of ad revenue is going to go where that audience still is — which rules out Hulu. For the time being at least. Since the service is obviously on a rising curve, it really might not be long before viewers use Hulu as an alternative for at least some of their TV viewing, and as soon as the statistics support that you can be sure the ad people will start to pay attention. Then Hulu really could be more important than TWC.

Whether or not Hulu is bigger or getting bigger than Time Warner is obviously a concern to the company. That’s why it introduced TV Everywhere, with plans to offer the same TV shows online to paying cable customers.

Hulu’s 38 million unique viewers could be extrapolated to may a couple of million of avid users who return to the site daily. There’s no way to really tell. But for Time Warner, whether subscribers watch TV or not, the cable company is making money off them.

Is Hulu more popular than Time Warner? Definitely, in a team spirit kind of way. I know readers of this blog like to complain about their cable company but it seems like it will take more than Hulu as is to get them to actually drop paid TV.

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