But will they actually pay up? Here, the conventional wisdom is not so helpful. Nor are studies predicting consumer behavior. To wit:

• Nearly 50 percent of U.S. Web users are willing to pay for online news, says the Boston Consulting Group.
• Not a chance, says Forrester (FORR): Try 20 percent.

For what it’s worth, my money’s on the Forrester number, or one that’s even lower. My gut says people love consuming news, but only in the broadest sense–Obama doesn’t really Twitter! What was Belichick thinking?–and that sort of stuff, which appeals to a very large audience, will always be free, and you’ll get it from Google (GOOG) or something like Yahoo (YHOO). Which leaves you with a small audience willing to pay for everything else.

But! We should note that people are indeed paying for “content” right now. In fact, they’re paying for a lot of it: $115 a month, up seven percent from last year, says NPD Group. The breakdown:

As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribed to a television service (satellite TV, basic/premium cable, or fiber-optic television service). A similar percentage of households (76 percent) paid for Internet subscriptions. Seventeen percent subscribed to an online music service or satellite radio; and 14 percent subscribed to online gaming subscription services.

More traditional forms of entertainment subscriptions, however, did not fare so well. The number of people subscribing to newspapers fell by 2 percentage points to reach 29 percent in August 2009. Forty-one percent of consumers subscribed to magazines this year, compared to 43 percent who did so last year.

According to NPD, an influx of new smartphone owners has led to an increase in mobile data-plan subscriptions: 9 percent of U.S. consumers had mobile data subscriptions this year, versus just 6 percent last year. Fourteen percent of consumers subscribed to a home-video subscription service, like Netflix, this year, which is 2 percentage points higher than last year.

Ah, see? Problem solved: If you want Americans to pony up for stuff on the Web, just link it to something they’re already paying for, like their cable or Internet subscription.

This is what smart guys like John Malone have been talking about for a while, and it’s also the core of the strategy behind the Time Warner (TWX)/Comcast (CMCSA)/everyone else “TV Everywhere” gambit. But it’s also what many people have been trying to do for a very long time–ask the music industry–with limited success.

But here are data that show that Hulu’s post-Sarah letdown may not have been as bad as we thought. The source: comScore.

The measurement company’s “Video Metrix” survey, out today, shows that Hulu’s unique viewers fell 6.4 percent from October to November. The comScore Media Metrix data I cited earlier showed a 10.8 percent drop (click to enlarge).

That’s because the two data sets are measuring two different things. ComScore (SCOR) analyst Andrew Lipsman’s explanation:

While Media Metrix data only accounts for visitors to the property URL, Video Metrix accounts for viewers across the expanded network of sites where video might be viewed. So while only visitors to Hulu.com are counted in Media Metrix, viewers of Hulu videos anywhere on the Internet would be credited in Video Metrix.”

In other words: The new data also include the audience from Hulu distribution partners like MySpace, as well as all those blogs that became de facto distribution partners by taking advantage of Hulu’s handy embedding feature. Once you factor them in, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC becomes much stickier. (But keep in mind that the distribution deals–at least the official ones–cut into Hulu’s slim margins).

Note also that the number of videos viewed dropped by an even smaller margin–3.6 percent. And note that engagement numbers–minutes per viewer and minutes per video–increased during the same time. Finally, note that all of this comes after a huge spike from September to October–uniques had jumped 91 percent–which means that the site was still able to keep most of its new audience.

It’s still worth watching to see how much of that audience sticks around over the long haul. Hulu’s most popular clips for December are almost entirely composed of “Saturday Night Live” bits. And unless I missed something, bits like this Obama parody aren’t generating the same kind of excitement that the Palin clips did. But I gotta say–it sure is easy to embed these suckers.

That, at least, is the theme of the grandly named “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” which kicks off today at Columbia Law School. The two-day event, organized by video start-up Howcast, is supposed help activists brainstorm ways to use Facebook and other social media to organize themselves and garner attention.

This is heady stuff, but there is some real-world grounding there: Organizers of a protest against FARC, the Columbian terrorists, credit Facebook with helping them rally millions of people against the group in February.

The man who organized that movement, Oscar Morales, will appear at the summit, and so will Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. I’m also interested to hear from members of the Obama campaign’s Internet team, who will appear Friday. And, um, so will I: I’m moderating a panel of media worthies, including MSNBC’s Luke Russert.

A full schedule is here, and if you can’t make the event in person, you should be able to tune in via Webcast at Howcast’s page.

[Image Credit: equinoXio]

But, for the record, here’s another winner: YouTube. This has nothing to do with the fact that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt stumped for Obama, but with the fact that YouTube users are furiously uploading versions of Obama’s Tuesday evening victory speech.

Video tracking service Visible Measures says it has tracked more than 500 versions of the clip embedded below (primarily on YouTube), which had generated some 6.8 million views by this morning. At least two million of those are coming from Obama’s official channel.

But as Obama bumps go, this one is relatively small. As of this afternoon, the speech had yet to crack YouTube’s most popular videos of the month page, which is where we learned that a new video of a nearly-naked Britney Spears has been viewed more than nine million times.

New York has three dailies (four if you count The Wall Street Journal, even more if you count specialty papers like the Spanish-language El Diario) and it’s impossible to buy any of them at newsstands today, according to an informal channel check conducted by … me.

Capitalism/speculation to the rescue: eBay (EBAY) seller jel2maine has 15 copies of today’s New York Times, and is asking for a mere $19.99 plus $3.99 shipping.

That’s a 1500 percent markup over the paper’s street price of $1.50. Any takers?

UPDATE: You may want to hold off before bidding. Dave Martin, a media watcher based in Madison, Wis., says a Times employee tells him the paper is rushing out an additional 50,000 copies this afternoon.

Confirmed–here’s New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis:

Yes, we are going back on press to print 50,000 copies of today’s paper for distribution at Grand Central, Penn Station, Port Authority and other select locations.

We had increased our print run for single copy sales today by about 35%. In 2004 we saw an increase in sales of around 50,000 copies the day after the election and based on what we’ve seen today, we expect to significantly surpass those sales.  We also plan to increase our print run for single copy sales tomorrow, although not as much as today.

I’m sure you know that today and tomorrow we have a special election section in the paper and, of course, on NYTimes.com, we have all sorts of features including, interactive graphics with all the presidential, senate and congressional election results by state and county, live updates on the blogs on the contested Senate race in Minnesota and the uncertainty of who will fill one of Alaska’s Senate seats. We also have a video of this campaign, going back to the primaries, called ‘Choosing a President,’ which is quite extraordinary.

According to our internal numbers, yesterday was a record day for NYTimes.com. There were 55.1 million page views, shattering the previous record by 29%.  We don’t have numbers yet for today. We’ve had record mobile page views of 2.7 million at NYTimes.com.”

[Image Credit: specialkrb]