Interesting story in this morning’s New York Times. Brian Stelter reviews online video site Hulu on its first anniversary. The site has received a lot of praise for its easy-to-use interface, but what’s most interesting is how it handles advertising. The key: more is less.

For media groups thinking about including video on their Web sites and not sure yet how to monetize that new media, Hulu’s experience is important to keep in mind.

Hulu streams TV programs that first appeared on broadcast television (the site is a co-production of NBC Universal and News Corp). While other TV sites try to jam as many ads as possible, only one ad is shown per segment break on Hulu. Fewer ads make the ones on the site more memorable, Hulu execs say, allowing the site to charge higher prices for the ad units. It benefits “advertisers as much as it is benefiting users,’ Jason Kilar, chief executive of the site, said.

The site has actually suffered a shortage of advertising lately due to the popularity of Saturday Night Live’s parodies of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The first skit about Palin was viewed 14.3 million times online vs. only 10.2 million on television.

The difference can be seen most clearly in the ad time per show. On NBC’s “The Office,” the commercial broadcast had 8 minutes of ads while on Hulu, ads took up only 2 minutes. ABC.com has had similar results. The one ad per segment resulted in a 54 percent ad recall rate according to research conducted by ABC.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. For example, repetition of the same ads is a problem. On Hulu, the software remembers where you stop when watching a movie, but the same ads may come up again and again.

Nevertheless, a customer survey conducted by Insight Express for Hulu over the summer found that 76 percent of 18,000 respondents said the site had the right amount of ads.