Comedy Central Scores Serious Numbers

MTV Networks’ strategy of splintering properties into separate verticals seems to be paying off for Comedy Central Digital, which says it pulled in 35 million video plays in March, an increase of 60 percent over the same time last year.

Brands under the Comedy Central Digital umbrella are comedycental.com, indecision2008.com, southparkstudios.com and thedailyshow.com.

South Park Studios starting to offer full episodes for free online certainly helped traffic, attracting more than half a million unique viewers in March. While Comedy Central touts a traffic jump of 711 percent to the site, that’s not really a fair comparison as prior to the redesign South Park Studios was primarily message boards and a blog. And, as if to prove some things never change on the Internet, the most watched full episode of South Park on the site was an episode called “Major Boobage.”

Additionally, despite being on hiatus for a week, The Daily Show site had its best month ever in March with 447,000 unique visitors.

Disclosure: I used to work for AtomFilms, which is now a part of ComedyCentral.