It may be the Wild West out there in digital media land, but when it comes to online, The Comedy Network VP Brent Haynes believes his employer has an ace in reserve.

‘The advantage for us is that comedy is totally in sync with what the Internet is all about,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t require a huge amount of attention and you don’t have to commit to it.’

Comedy’s website (comedynetwork.ca) has been relaunched for the network’s tenth anniversary celebration. ‘It’s got 95% less suckage,’ Haynes quips of the new ‘online destination of all things comedy in Canada.’

This is about the third relaunch, depending on who you ask, since The Comedy Network first went online in 1998. ‘We’re making it up as we go along,’ Haynes cheerfully admits.

A previous relaunch (which rolled out broadband capabilities) came with the catchphrase, ‘Our website doesn’t suck anymore.’

The jewel in the crown of this iteration is on-demand programming, which features hundreds of hours of shows that you couldn’t get online before, including 12 new TV series and 17 series created for the web.

The new site also features full-length episodes of South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and The Sarah Silverman Show, along with new, web-only shows including Lil’ Bush.

The beauty here, Haynes says, is that the channel has cleared rights for a sizable font of material, thanks largely to an exclusive, multi-platform, multi-year deal with Comedy Central in the U.S.

‘We had a library that could compete with any comedy website out there,’ says Haynes. ‘We already had the brands, the name shows – why not put it up?’

On the homegrown front, Haynes points out that content produced exclusively for the site such as Good Morning World from Canadian comics Peter Oldring and Pat Kelly is a terrific testing ground. It allows TCN to try out young talent (without spending too much) and expose that content directly to its audience (bypassing the focus group route), and to measure the response more accurately than on the tube.

Haynes says that measuring online usage is a much more accurate science than TV measurement, especially for TCN, which has a disproportionate number of viewers that are post-secondary students in dorms – a demo that is overlooked by traditional TV measurement systems.

Now that TCN has the material and the technology, the site is being actively programmed, not unlike a TV channel.

Haynes remembers the old days (when the site did suck) and the debates staff used to have. They knew that the Internet was the way of the future, but at the time it cost so much money – cash that invariably had to come off the screen – and the returns were meager.

‘We knew we were going down that road,’ he recalls, ‘The problem was: How do we invest in the future without hurting our on-air shows?’

That question remains in some circles, but not at TCN, where they are treating the web as a complementary tool to the network.