Comedy Central focuses on… comedy?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 3rd, 2008

The Broadcasting & Cable article says that:

Comedy Central is planning a relaunch of Jokes.com, the centerpiece of which will be an extensive video archive of the network’s standup comedy material.

Comedy is hoping to leverage the Jokes.com URL with its standup credibility to create the go-to place for comedians’ content online. The new site is slated to be formally unveiled in December.

The Jokes.com URL started as a collection of the Web’s largest collection of jokes. In 2004 it was “merged into Comedycentral.com.” The distinction that is being made– the point of the press releases and the announcements– is that this is a “relaunch” of that portion of the comedycentral.com site and that it will be a “standalone” site specifically for jokes and standup clips. What the execs like to shorthandedly refer to as a “vertical.”

The VP of digital programming for MTVN said that “Our heritage is standup and our future is standup. We should be a conduit for you to put up your content as a standup comedian and get it placed next to the comedians you care about.”

…aspiring comedians may get the chance to upload their own original material to personalized pages, though the network is still working out the final details for the site.

We predict this will be taken off the table before relaunch. When space doesn’t really exist in “cyberspace”– This site is adjacent to comedycentral.com which is adjacent to amazon.com, which is adjacent to every other site on the WWW– the idea of putting up one’s clip “next to the comedians you care about” is nothing to get worked up about. Traffic? Sure, but without any compensation, traffic is a hollow victory, especially if all it does is divert more cash to MTVN’s 122 channels, more than 100 Web sites, broadband channels and mobile content providers.

It wouldn’t be the first time they floated an idea then pulled it. Four years ago they announced plans for a cable channel devoted solely to standup. Perhaps that idea has morphed into a “vertical standalone” called Jokes.com.

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