Comedy Central's Daily Show

After months of fruitless negotiations with YouTube regarding its copyrighted material, Viacom will begin promoting its own sites, such as ComedyCentral.com, offering a format similar to YouTube's, reports CNET. The comedy site is featuring embed codes to allow fans of programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to post clips to their MySpace pages or their blogs.

"YouTube throws down the gauntlet for any television network or content producer to ask, 'Why is it better for people to consume our video on YouTube rather than my site?'" says Erik Flannigan, SVP of digital media for Comedy Central. In response, Viacom plans to roll out similar strategies for Nickelodeon, MTV and Spike TV.

It's unclear whether ComedyCentral's embeddable clips will expire as Lost Remote reported some months ago. Also, public relations blogger Terry Heaton has created a chart based on Alexa data showing just how far ComedyCentral.com has to go to catch up to YouTube in terms of traffic.

Though Viacom receives a great amount of free publicity from YouTube, the problem lies in ad dollars: other companies that advertise benefit from Viacom's content, but Viacom doesn't generate revenue from that advertising.

Viacom has already demanded that YouTube pull 100,000 of its clips.Some media giants, however, have signed an uneasy truce with YouTube. Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and CBS have struck partnerships with YouTube to allow the site to feature clips from their TV shows.