Will Ferrell: Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

VentureBeat reports:

VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week.

Check out the video here.

Ferrell and McKay are building a comedy video community, and there are currently 397 videos on the site. "The Landlord", with 6,555,803 views is number 1, with the 2nd place video placing well back at 204,632 views. When you consider the number of views on YouTube of "The Landlord", they have well over 7,000,000 views.

And that brings up another interesting point. Everyone expect videos to be available on YouTube, and when you search for "will ferrell landlord" you'll see one of several links:

• Spam: unscrupulous people placing the words "will ferrell landlord" into the titles of their videos (that have nothing to do with the topic) to get hits on YouTube searches.



• Videos that don't work: Uploaded by friendly internet users, these videos have anywhere between 1,000 and 150,000 views before getting pulled because of copyright violations.



• Videos that work: Uploaded by other friendly internet users, these videos will be taken down soon.

In remains to be seen whether or not people will go to sites other than YouTube in significant numbers to view videos. For now, it seems like plenty are diverting themselves from YouTube to Funnyordie.com. In addition, other content providers like Fox's American Idol are pulling their content from the site, making YouTube less of a one-stop shop that it once was.