Funny or Die - Will Ferrell’s YouTube

I recently came across FunnyOrDie. It’s a video sharing community like YouTube, but purely for comedy videos. Set up by Will Ferrell (who I love) and some of his comedy pals. The idea is simple. Users have to vote whether a comedy clip is funny or not. Crap videos are banished to ‘the crypt’ whereas great ones (with over 50,000 votes) become ‘immortal’.

You’re probably thinking there are already enough ‘me-too’ video sharing sites. But considering it only launched in April , it’s already got quite a following. According to this blog post it is the fastest growing website ever!  An amazing 1.7 million unique visitors in its first week. I guess its popularity is not all that surprising. If you take a comedy celebrity like Will Ferrell, throw in today’s connected web users, and what emerges is a grass-roots community. I wonder if we’ll see more celebrities get involved in the Web 2.0 hype. There seems to be demand for it - Lily Allen’s MySpace presence is another example of this.

There’s some great clips on FunnyOrDie with Will Ferrell himself. The most popular being ‘the landlord’ and the even funnier out takes . Here’s another classic (though borrowed from YouTube).

More on this story here, here, and here…