Viacom has finally taken steps to make 13,000 clips of their hit political comedy, “The Daily Show,” available online. But don’t be mistaken, none of these will be on YouTube. You can now watch John Stewart dish out his insightful brand of satirical political comedy right on TheDailyShow.com. You can even embed the videos there in your blog (see above).I suppose this is some sort of bitchslap aimed at YouTube, whom Viacom is currently suing for $1 billion - as if to say, “Hey YouTube, here’s our prized content. Ohh you can’t have it. And look at all the pretty advertising we’re selling.”

The thing is, nobody really goes to Viacom’s pet Web sites to be entertained by Web video. As of today, the show’s website ranks 1,035,743 on Alexa (that’s bad) vs YouTube’s ranking of about 4 (thats cray). YouTube is not just a Web site. It’s an online community of people entertaining one another with video. It is, itself, an entertainment platform. This is why Viacom’s little experiment won’t work: it’s not just about the Daily Show videos, it’s about where people want to go to find fun videos. Right now, that’s YouTube. And sometimes iMoondo.