Comedy Central gives audiences access to a world of super funny, personally relatable, culturally relevant, and provocative comedy that tells the funny truths of life, every day and everywhere. From award-winning late-night, scripted and animated series to stand-up specials, short-form and sketch, Comedy Central has it all. Our objective for YouTube is simple: to be the longform digital video hub for comedy.
Comedy Central's YouTube channel serves as the main hub for our comedy content on YouTube, and supports our larger ecosystem of spinoff channels, including Key & Peele, The Daily Show, and Comedy Central Stand-Up. We aim to increase the average views on our YouTube videos, experiment with new features, and grow our subscriber base, all while featuring a diverse array of platform-specific comedy content.
Fresh off of meeting 2020’s YouTube goal of crossing 10 million subscribers, one primary goal of 2021 for the Comedy Central YouTube channel became incorporating YouTube’s new Shorts feature into the overall channel strategy, especially in efforts to re-package classic moments from the Comedy Central library. The strategy was especially effective in the fall of 2021, where Shorts releases alone generated nearly 9 million views from October through the end of November.
Our programming is a mix of relevance-driving digital originals and content from our iconic IP.
With COVID still making productions a challenge in 2021, the Comedy Central channel had to lean heavily into compilations, Shorts, and livestreams to help continue the steady stream of programming that Comedy Central subscribers have come to expect. Through some experimentation and creativity, new formats for compilations (such as the Devastating Burns series featuring Comedy Central Roasts) and looping livestreams were developed and became a new staple in the channel strategy in 2021.
In November 2020, the Comedy Central YouTube channel crossed the 10 million subscriber milestone, and continued its momentum through to 2021. Now, with nearly 10.7 million subscribers to-date, the channel still continues to bring in millions of viewers looking for laughs and engagement with Comedy Central’s unique and regular video offerings. Despite challenges for content production due to COVID—over 300 new videos were published on the Comedy Central brand channel in 2021, and its ever-engaged viewers added 310,000 comments to the channel’s videos in 2021 alone. As the center of a larger YouTube ecosystem for the Comedy Central brand—one that is made up of separate YouTube channels for The Daily Show, Animated, Stand-Up, and more—the Comedy Central channel continued to uphold its significant role as a kingpin for building up fandom for the brand in 2021.
The Comedy Central channel continued to be a highly-watched and highly-engaged channel on YouTube in 2021, generating nearly 500 million views and over 2.6 billion minutes-watched and—perhaps most important given the brand channel’s role as a center in a larger YouTube ecosystem—more than 5.5 billion impressions.
