”Every time I come up with a new idea, people think I’ve gone mad,” John Lloyd explains. “My friends wouldn’t speak to me during Spitting Image’s first year on air, Blackadder was howled down as hopeless and the entire television industry pretty much laughed QI out of the room. Given that context, me putting commissioned comedy on the internet has been received relatively well.”

Lloyd is explaining Comedybox – or, more accurately, comedybox.tv – a new website from Warner Music that carries classic comedy clips, footage of new stand-ups and specially made sketches from users and industry names. Comedybox takes audio of acts such as Steve Martin and Bill Hicks from Warner’s archive, and clips of DVDs from the likes of Eddie Izzard, the Mighty Boosh and Dylan Moran (with links to buy said disc), mixes it up with the new material and hopes to develop a healthy business.

Lloyd isn’t alone. In America, Sony has used its purchase of the video-sharing site Grouper to launch Crackle, a website featuring emerging stand-ups and sketches from new writers and performers. Circuit comics such as Jason Byrne and Ian Boldsworth have also embraced podcasts, offering weekly shows in varying formats. With Peter Serafinowicz, of Spaced and Look Around You fame, securing a sketch show on BBC2 this autumn after posting parody news items on YouTube, the comedy industry is waking up to this newfangled interweb business.

“The podcast is basically me and my mate Ed bullying Raji James, the actor who used to be in EastEnders,” Boldsworth explains. “We send out letters to production companies with ideas for shows he could star in, or contact Madame Tussauds and ask them to make a waxwork of him, then present the evidence each week. It’s technically very poor, because we do it ourselves, but it’s been doing well on iTunes.”

In part, these sites are a talent-spotting game. Brian Dalton created a series about God, Mr Deity, which began life on YouTube before moving to Crackle. With Sony’s marketing push behind it, it secured 5.7m viewings in a few months, which led to the company buying up the skits and Dalton developing them into a television show. Lloyd sees it as a way of circumventing the fear of risk that he sees gripping most comedy controllers in television and radio.

Of course, there is a more compelling reason for these moves: the Napster effect. According to the US-based Pew Research Center, comedy is the second most popular form of online video content, close behind news, with almost 10% of adults watching some form of comedy video daily – although these results may be faintly suspect, as Pew’s breakdown suggests more people watch comedy online every day than have ever used the net to view pornography. Pew’s research is slightly more intuitive, however, when it shows that comedy overtakes news in the popularity stakes for 18-to 30-year-olds. Although the chart for YouTube’s all-time most watched videos is dominated by music videos and amateur footage, comedy clips can still rack up millions of viewings a month.

Many of these clips are uploads from DVDs or TV shows, placed on websites by fans in much the same way that file-sharing evangelists have been posting music since the late 1990s. The problem for many comics, of course, is that, whereas you can listen to a great song time after time, and may be persuaded to buy it, it’s a rare joke that doesn’t become irritating after the third hearing.

“There are many comics who are wary of performing their best material on television,” explains Marcus Brigstocke, stand-up and guest on Radio 4’s The Now Show. “They know they can get maybe £1,000 a week on the circuit, playing clubs and using the same material month in, month out. These days, comics are finding their routines appearing online, from comedy-club video cameras or even audience members’ mobile phones, and complaining that they are losing their livelihood.”

The past few years have seen DVD sales – which made Peter Kay and Ricky Gervais into millionaires – halt their seemingly endless climb and start to fall off. Illegal uploads are blamed for a good chunk of these missing sales, which represent a tidy piece of change for comics and their agents. Hence sites such as Comedybox offering links to buy.

Brigstocke warns, however, that the success of these sites may have a negative effect on the shape of comedy, with young stand-ups opting for download-friendly quick-gag routines rather than complex and structured material. “Acts like Eddie Izzard and Bill Bailey have such subtle and interwoven shows that you could never get a sense of them from a 60-second clip,” he argues. “I hope the internet doesn’t drain that kind of comedy away, leaving us with stand-ups who only understand one-liners.”

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