Have you heard the one about the comedian, the venture capitalist and the socialite?

If so, you may be one of the 5m people who saw a spoof presidential campaign video starring Paris Hilton that was posted on Funnyordie.com last week.

The comedy website was co-founded last year by Will Ferrell, star of quirky Hollywood hits such as Anchorman, and backed by Sequoia Capital, the American venture-capital firm that helped to finance Google, Apple and Cisco.

The Paris Hilton skit has proved the most popular video on the site since its inaugural sketch The Landlord, which stars Ferrell and has so far attracted 58m hits.

Funnyordie hopes to make money by selling advertising and sponsorship. It has caught the imagination of Hollywood’s powerbrokers, but it is still too early to say whether the site will be as big a success as previous Sequoia blockbusters.

“Within the talent community, Funnyordie has a fair bit of relevance based on who is attached to it,” said Daniel Frankel, a reporter at Variety, the entertainment industry trade paper. “In terms of advertising sales and monetising the site, that’s yet to happen.”

According to Comscore, which monitors internet usage, the site attracted 1.2m visitors in June 2008, the latest figures available. That puts it some way short of America’s most popular comedy site, National Lampoon, which drew 10.3m visitors, and represents a big drop from the 4.5m who logged on to Funnyordie in its first month in April 2007.

Ferrell’s site may make the jump to this side of the Atlantic. If it does, he would find himself pitted against a number of similar new British sites.

Comedybox, created by John Lloyd, the veteran producer behind television shows such as Not The Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder, is close to celebrating its first anniversary. It was launched last year in partnership with Warner Music Entertainment, a division of the Warner records empire, and last week announced a tie-up with MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corporation, ultimate owner of The Sunday Times.

This summer RDF Media, the television production firm behind shows such as Wife Swap and Scrapheap Challenge, launched Comedy Demon.

Despite being backed by some of the biggest names in comedy, the British sites face the same challenge as Funnyordie: how to make money. “It is questionable how many of these sorts of sites the market will sustain,” said Dan Cryan, a senior analyst at Screen Digest, a media consultancy.

But there is some good news. Cryan said that comedy sites may succeed if they can appeal to a demographic that is notoriously difficult for advertisers to reach: young males, who have most readily abandoned traditional television.

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