You’ve got a competitor with deep pockets, huge brand recognition and a lot of traffic that is interested in your content. What do you do?

Here are two very different approaches:

GateHouse Media is suing The New York Times Co., whose Boston Globe has been linking from its hyperlocal site to stories on GateHouse’s Wicked Local site.

Wicked awesome Hulu is co-opting archrival YouTube’s traffic. If you do a search for Simpsons clips on YouTube, you’re likely to see clips uploaded to YouTube by Hulu. Here’s one I found:

Rather than try to rewrite more than a decade of Web practices (if not copyright law), Hulu is working the system to reach a lot of interested users where they are. It’s a brilliant move and the kind of thinking that is virtually nonexistent within the newspaper industry.

The clip promotes Hulu as the destination for premium content on the Internet. Users have a clear choice: watch excerpts with an annoying Hulu ticker on YouTube or go to hulu.com where they can watch the full video in higher quality without the ticker.

In the short run, this helps Google by providing content for popular queries. In the long run, hulu is the big winner.

More on: hulu, newspapers, YouTube