The Best Medicine

It only makes sense. These are heavy times, and people are looking for more laughs. Well, at least Internet surfers. Last week, ComScore Media Metrix released their top-50 Web property list for August, and as compared to last year, comedy Web sites received a whopping 21 percent more visitors in 2009.

Not surprisingly, ComScore's list showed that most Internet traffic was generated from Google, with 161 million hits, followed by Yahoo! with 150 million, and Microsoft at 130 million. Meanwhile, Facebook didn't budge from its number five position, holding strong as the top social media site with 92 million hits.

As for e-commerce, eBay beat out Amazon.com by a nose with 71.8 million visitors. The other big hitters were education sites, which showed a 10 percent increase over last year, and home improvement sites, which a comScore press release attributed to both the back-to-school and fall home and garden seasons.

But perhaps most revealing, comedy sites enjoyed the biggest spike with of 33.7 million hits. But what kind of humor are we seeking? With 5.6 million visitors, first place went to Break.com, a site featuring humorous video clips and college-age guy content (Dude, Break.com is also ranked the number one humor website by Hitwise). Second place went to Comedy Central with 4.4 million hits, while third place went to Wimp.com, a low-res comedy video nerve center featuring all-age content.

Call it escapism, but this trend toward humor will probably continue over the next few years as people seek out more comic relief to stave off the ongoing deluge of seriousness. Now if television would simply follow suit. Will sitcoms and canned laughter cycle back in and replace the slew of crime shows that have overrun the airwaves? Only time will tell, but you have to wonder, how many more deadpans on single human hair follicles can the culture endure?

Photo courtesy afsilva via flickr.