Comedy Central's Killer App: South Park

Written by Frank Smith

Thursday, April 17. 2008 at 04:35 PM EDT Post a comment

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Comedy Central Digital released some positive numbers this week for its Website traffic. In March 2008, the network's online initiatives drew in over 3 million unique visitors. This was Comedy Central's highest trafficked month in 2008, and traffic was up 60 percent compared to March of last year.

There were 35 million video plays in March 2008, up 50 percent from the previous year. Comedy Central Digital also pulled in 30 million page views in March 2008, an increase of 30 percent over the previous month and up 25 percent from March 2007.

The network cites the redesign of SouthParkStudios.com as a major driver of increased traffic. The South Park hub jumped up 711 percent, attracting 503,000 monthly unique visitors. "Major Boobage" was the site's most popular full-episode.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was on hiatus the first week of March, but the show's Website (TheDailyShow.com) experienced its best month ever, says Comedy Central, with over 447,000 monthly unique visitors. And, traffic to The Colbert Report's site increased 88 percent.

"It's a great example for anyone else: If you build it, they will come. Before they weren't even building it. It's important to have the content out there," says JupiterResearch analyst Bobby Tulsiani.

The lack of a dedicated portal for networks to bring their content online causes users to head over to YouTube Inc. Comedy Central Digital has been very aggressive about building up its online portals with full-length broadcast content as well as chapterized content.

"Most cable carriers can't do this. Broadcast networks do this online, but cable carriers can't. They have a carrier fee from Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), for example. 'Hey, I'm giving you $2 for MTV and you're giving it away for free,' " says Tulsiani channeling a Comcast exec. "So MTV and ESPN are giving away supplemental content. An episode of the Real World might still be on TV, but cast auditions would be on MTV.com."

"It's South Park," he says. "That's the killer app for video. It's very viral, very comedy-related, and very male-oriented. It's perfect for online video."