Seth

Time Warner Invests in Comedy Website: No Easy Laughs to the Bank

Rob and Warren,
I can appreciate your looking out for how your company is characterized and am glad you took the opportunity to speak up. It's not everyday two executives take the time to participate in conversation on their company.

To this article: this was primarily about Funny or Die and their new partnership. Since the references to the competitive landscape, which include MyDamnChannel, were intended to provide just a survey of the broad video marketplace, a detailed traffic analysis and discussion of other sites (yours included) was left out. That notwithstanding, the article should have referenced (and has been corrected on Metue.com (and will be adjusted on SA) to refer) to traffic growth for MyDamnChannel.com “in the early days” rather than as it appeared. For that edit that didn’t make the jump from my hand written notes to the final copy, I’ll deservedly take the shot.

As to the data, the linked article, of course, references numbers from its publishing date. With the editorial correction, that should be clearer and stall any confusion.

I also want to point out that the linked prior article noted two other things: 1. It was still too early to judge your traffic fairly, and 2. It said: Along with YouTube, “Adding a second outlet through MySpaceTV, and leveraging the strength of MySpace’s brand should significantly increase [My Damn Channel’s] audience reach and name recognition.”

The intent, then and now, was to revisit MyDamnChannel in a different posting to look in on that; to write an article that takes into account different measurements that are more appropriate to the business model you’ve adopted.

As I’m sure you’d be quick to point out, using Quantcast data, Alexa, ComScore or other page view numbers for your site (as was the original measurement) is potentially misleading. To note Funny or Die is getting 2.7m global unique visitors, or College Humor’s 1.3m, or your own 347k (via Quantcast) doesn’t give a complete picture. Since MyDamnChannel programming draws a sizable amount of views from syndication agreements with YouTube, MySpace etc, better measurement would be to count things like total video clip views and cross-site subscriber numbers.

Besides that, as a further caveat on unique visitors, Quantcast’s own disclosures point out that unique visitor metrics are actually “cookie counts,” a tabulation of total visitors based on the number of unique cookies placed or received by visitors to a site. Since many browsers and security programs routinely delete these cookie files, the actual number of unique visitors for a site can be thrown off due to repetition. The ‘overcount, ’ Quantcast says, can sometimes be a factor of two or three times greater than the actual number.

I’d be glad to touch base and hear your take for an appropriate follow up that focuses on MyDamnChannel, including the business model and audience acceptance.

In the interim, thanks for the messages.