With the Disney-owned and partially ad-supported streaming service, Hulu, is launching a self-service tool, part of an increasingly common feature designed to make advertising on platforms easier for small business.

Hulu’s Ad Manager, launched in Beta last week, according to a blog post on the company’s website by Faye Trapani, director of self-service platform sales, is designed to give “smaller businesses the ability to advertise in a high quality, premium streaming television environment.”

The post continues, “Hulu Ad Manager gives buyers a simple and intuitive way to tell their story on Hulu with a minimum campaign spend of $500.” While there won’t be a dedicated sales team, there will be some support (and vetting) despite the fact that such a sum is far lower than the typical ad buy on the platform.

While top 200 brands have been important to Hulu’s growth, the post says, it wants to open itself up to more modest budgets.

Hulu is the latest in a series of companies big and small that are opening up their ad services. In January, Walmart announced that it would be opening such a portal, while TikTok opened its self-serve feature earlier this month.

Google and Facebook, meanwhile, have largely built their empires on self-service offers that have allowed them to create the bulk of their revenues from small and medium sized businesses. Witness the stat from last month that showed how even the major brands boycotting Facebook accounted for less than 1% of revenues. The strength is in the long tail.

Sourced from Hulu, WARC