Let me apologize in advance for the long wind up here.  But the point needs some elaboration

When I was a kid I loved Comic Books.  I spent every cent I had on them, collected all the industry mags/zines, even kept tabs on CompuServe (where most comic creators had an account at the time) and the Newsgroups (this is pre-Mainstream Web). 

Then, one glorious day, my local comic shop agreed to let me work part time after school.  With that a whole new world of information was opened to me.  The world of distributor Sales figures.

The thing you have to understand is that these figures were top secret at the time.  I'd actually tried to get at them every way a Jr. High age kid could and fell flat on my face every time.  But now I had them and let me tell you...I was SHOCKED.

Why you ask? 

Comic fans are an emotional lot.  So every time a major change happens in their favorite book you'll see a lot of people screaming about how they'll "drop the book" or "never read a Marvel comic again."  I always assumed these people made good on their threat.  But one look at the sales charts showed they simply couldn't have.  Even if new people were coming in to replace them it would cause some fluctuation as new people showed up right before the old ones left.   But there was none of that. 

In fact, sales were about as consistent as any product I've ever seen, even as an adult (who has seen his fair share of sales charts).  It was pretty clear these people were just blowing off steam and had no intention of following through with their threats.

Which leads me to the point of this long wind-up.  I quote from Wired online's article about Hulu...

Two weeks ago, comScore’s report that Hulu had pulled into the top three streaming video sites was quickly followed by news that Disney — the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN—was taking a stake in the venture. But in the long run, those two milestones could be overshadowed by a seemingly much smaller bit of news: the decision in January to pull most episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from the site.

Instead of carrying every episode of Sunny, a way off-center Danny DeVito comedy that languished on FX until Hulu users made it one of the site’s most popular programs, Hulu limited its offering to the five most recent shows. User reaction to the move was swift and predictable. “Well, off to the torrent sites,” one wrote on Hulu’s Sunny forum. “Hulu blows!” declared another. “Whose retarded idea was that?”

So that's the point of the long intro to this post.  As an adult I'm far less shocked by this behavior in that I've seen enough emotional people in my life to realize they tend to over react and say things they don't mean when angry.  Still the fact that people like this author try to use those angry responses as proof of their point makes the lesson a good one to have.

The really ironic part of this quote is the fact that the author admits the episodes were pulled in January and that, as of two weeks ago, Hulu is growing like crazy.  So the obvious conclusion is that the incident in question had very little effect on Hulu.   He just chose to ignore those facts.

There's one more piece to this article that I'd like to address but this post  has already gone on a little too long so I'll save that...for tomorrow

(that's called a teaser ;)