We were unaware of the contest that Comedy Central was sponsoring until we saw Tim Slaigle pumping his video via Facebook.

It’s the Open Mic Challenge.

Welcome to the Jokes.com Open Mic Challenge! Are you an aspiring stand-up comedian? Show us your bits for the chance to appear on Comedy Central. Check back every month for a new challenge!

We notice that there’s not a whole lot of comments or views for the videos, even those that have been up for four or five days. This is odd, considering that it’s backed by Comedy Central. Hmmm… are folks growing tired of online video contests? Are comedians hip to the draconian Content Submission Policies? (We clicked on this one and got a “The Page You Are Looking For Cannot Be Found” message. Hmmm… would any video submitted during this timeframe not be subject to the (no doubt) ridiculous and one-sided terms of the normal submission policy?)

Anyway, we’ll check back to see if it gets any momentum. Perhaps the adverts haven’t started running yet.

Or, it’s yet another case of folks trying and failing to shoehorn old conventions into the Web (the L.A. Times capitalizes it). Like producing television “Webisodes” of original content for exclusive exhibition on the Web.

An LAT article, titled “Hollywood hits the stop button on high-profile Web video efforts” by Ben Fritz and Dawn Chmielewski, serves as an obituary and a coroner’s report on the failed effort by several large entertainment entities (and several smaller “investors”) to create successful “online comedy initiatives,” or OCIs, in the lingo of that sub-genre of the entertainment industry.

Nearly all have failed. Some still struggle on.

The number of studios bankrolling Web videos has shrunk significantly, however. As a result, many who continue to believe in the promise of Web video are coalescing around new ideas such as integrating sponsors into projects ahead of production.

“There are fewer buyers now, so increasingly that conversation involves working backward from what a brand needs, rather than financing a Web video in complete isolation,” said Jordan Levin, chief executive of production company Generate, which specializes in digital content.

Ah… So… You’re going to make… long-form… commercials? The kids will eat that right up. (The same kids, we are constantly reminded, who do not like “slick” or scripted comedy. The same savvy kids who can smell the stench a sales pitch from a mile away? Oh, this is going to be big!)

Full disclosure: We dodged this bullet when, back a couple years ago, we were considered for the position of running Super Deluxe, Turner’s failed OCI. We suspect we were turned down because we asked for too much money. Turns out, our suspicions were probably dead-on:

With the search for a sustainable business model ongoing, many wonder how long talented people will continue to work for peanuts and the promise of rewards somewhere over the rainbow.

Los Angeles-based Big Fantastic, a group of filmmakers, has produced six series over the last two years for various Web production companies. Still, writer and director Chris Hempel admits they’re waiting for their big reward.

But money is probably less of a problem than the folks who are behind these ventures who just plain old don’t understand the medium. They may understand television or movies or talent management, but they don’t “get” the Web.

An awful lot of what we see on the WWW is merely an attempt by some folks with deep pockets to bend the WWW to their will. To make it do what the other media have done– Instead of episodes, we’ll call them “webisodes,” and it’ll be just like TV! But we’ll make it do what we want on a somewhat different scale, with different ways of generating revenue!

But along the way, they make fundamental errors. Like not letting others embed your content. Or attempting to make your product look just like television, when that medium is actually sliding in popularity. Or trying to “manufacture” videos that are “viral.” Or plucking someone from obscurity (someone who has created videos on a shoestring that have garnered millions of hits) and setting them up with larger budgets on the assumption that the larger budget will automatically mean that many more hits.

In our Montreal updates from 2000, we marveled at how many new, online ventures there were. (We called them dot-coms back then, remember?) And we saw them as dripping with opportunity:

The back page of the HRSCI was purchased by Laugh.com. Half of the lobby is dominated by comedyworld.com’s “cybercast” corral and banners hang overhead touting thefunniest.com and pop.com. The folks at humorvision.com (a division of fastband.com) purchased a quarter-pager and playboy.com has dispatched a representative or two. And, of course, SHECKY! (sheckymagazine.com) is present in the form of editors Brian McKim and Traci Skene. There is an explosion of dot-commers here at the festival this year. Much more so than last year. And there are many more business cards with email addresses.

What does all this mean? We overheard one comedian, when the plethora of dot-commers was brought to her attention, say that there were “too many dot-coms” here at the Festival. What the hell does that mean? There can never be too many movie production companies around. There can never be too many talent agents milling about. There can never be too many network executives present. How ever can there be too many dot-coms? The internet represents opportunity for comics. Can we all agree that there can never be too many opportunities? Although SHECKY! might be a dot-com, we are proud of our sub-motto: “We’re not making any money, but we’re not losing any, either!” (Apparently that’s something that many of the dot-comsters cannot claim!)

And we were correct: Within a year or so, many or all of the dot-coms we mentioned were tax write-offs, investment black holes, smoldering wrecks. Some claim they were victims of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. But it wasn’t that investment dried up, it was their model that doomed them. Some tried to make the internet into a movie studio or a distributor. Others tried to make their domain into a radio studio. Others into portals or clearinghouses. None survived.

There is a certain irony here. Way back when, folks were up in arms and ready to write their congressman to pass laws to protect the WWW– “If we don’t do something now, the Web will be dominated by Time-Warner! And General Electric! And Rupert Murdoch! And Starbucks! And Archer Daniels Midland! And high-fructose corn syrup!” Little did they know that the WWW needed no defending– it’s big and sprawling and wild and untameable, we would tell anyone who’d listen. The “newshole” is infinitely large, the network is “scalable,” it reaches hundreds of millions. And that is what attracts Hollywood to it… and that is what also confounds Hollywood when it tries to make it do tricks.