Funny Web Destinations

Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.

The reason that a site like Googlefight has some longevity, or legs, is that it draws upon a community effort to constantly update itself (with new examples of humorous juxtapositions). Community participation is a crucial element in many web content success storiesand has the virtue that you don't have to create the content yourself! See "Great Communities," later in this chapter, for more information.