Website Review: Thedailyshow.com

YouTube.com is a huge part of pop culture now. Bored office workers spend hours hiding from their bosses while watching video clips on the site. I’ve spent way too much of my free time there. It’s addicting. But the thing that got me addicted was the awesome collection of clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report and other various old shows that YouTube used to host. I was never all that interested in Tay Zonday or Chris Crocker or any of the other homegrown Internet superstars.

But, in 2006, the fun died when Viacom ordered YouTube to purge from their servers, not only all of Viacom’s content, but any content that included Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or anyone else affiliated with them that wasn’t owned by Viacom. It was a sad day on the Internets. It just didn’t make sense. The clips weren’t available elsewhere. They weren’t out on DVD or on any other website, so Viacom didn’t seem to stand to lose any money by letting YouTube users upload their content. But they persisted, even suing YouTube’s owner, Google, for $1 billion.

Months later, we’re finally able to see why they were so harsh on YouTube. The Daily Show recently launched its own independent website full of clips from nearly every show aired since 1999– thedailyshow.com. It’s a magnificent idea that expands on Comedy Central’s MotherLoad site. MotherLoad carries all the recent clips from all of Comedy Central’s shows. It doesn’t have much of an archive and it is hit or miss in terms of whether it works. Sometimes it pretends to load a video and then suddenly switches to the next queued video. Plus, the ads that play before and after clips are obnoxious.

So, when I heard that thedailyshow.com was coming, I hoped it would be wholly independent of Comedy Central’s site and be more like the fake-news-glory days of YouTube. Unfortunately the beta site that recently went live is tied to ComedyCentral.com, and it does have some of the same glitches as MotherLoad. It also plays the same ads from the same sponsors over and over, before and after every clip.

Article Author: Tami Beyersdoerfer

Tami Beyersdoerfer is a professional writing student at the University of Oklahoma.

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