Want traffic? Maybe you should consider making your free website a humor hit. People, and lots of them, just can’t seem to get enough funny stuff.

Before answering the "why" people love funny websites, let’s take a look at the "how many" and see if that might be an audience that you can tap into for your free website.

According to ebiz/MBA, an ecommerce business knowledgebase, the top humor website on the internet is Break.com with over 11,000,000 unique visitors per month. At the bottom of their top 15 list is FunnyJunk.com with 1.2 million monthly visitors. In between the top and the bottom are old standbys like The Onion, Jib Jab, e-Baum’s World and a few newer additions to the world of internet humor like ICanHasCheezBurger.com. Combined these sites have an estimated 43.3 million unique visitors hitting their websites. That’s a lot of laughs.

When you consider that this list consists of only true "humor sites" and not mega monsters like YouTube.com and Hulu.com that have humor content, the number of people seeking a chuckle is really substantial and that group can represent a big market for your free website.

Websites and voyeurism

For the same reason that television is loaded with reality shows, the most popular website humor is based on that same voyeuristic kick people get when they view "funny videos." Being able to look in on somebody else making a fool of themselves or being played for a fool without fear of being caught watching is actually a big draw of website humor.

The anonymity that the internet provides allows viewers to watch and find humor in content that they may otherwise avoid in person for fear of being seen as insensitive or cruel. This anonymity for the viewer allows "humorous" content to be published (also anonymously) that appeals to our coarser tastes and can perhaps be considered the downside of internet humor.

On the other hand…

There’s a ton of really funny stuff on the web. Thanks to technology everybody can get in on the act. Weddings can become one act humor plays as the incredible "First Dance" video proved with over 13 million views followed by the better choreographed "Jill and Kevin Heinz Wedding March" with over 1 million views. Jill and Kevin actually went on to create a "Divorce Dance" video that faired almost as well as the original.

Humor just makes us feel good and the internet is a great place to get a topic specific dose thanks to Google and the other search engines. If you decide to take your free website in this direction just remember there’s a ton of competition and you are going to want to focus on a specific humor niche like pets (12 million returns) or better yet dogs (3.2 million returns) or cats (378,000 returns) or geckos (327,000 returns). The tighter the focus the better the odds of ranking well and the better relevant advertising will perform.

The commercial downside to humor websites

We all love to laugh and humor can lower our blood pressure, change our mood and even pump endorphins into our system and those are the very things that can make it difficult to sell anything on a humor website.

Visitors become so engaged in the content that they ignore everything else. It’s not uncommon to see these types of websites have incredible page view and time on page statistics as viewers go from one funny experience to another. However, you have to create a website in such a fashion as to embed your promotional efforts into the content.

This can be a real challenge when planning designing your web page. YouTube and other video websites have tried to include pre-rolls and post-rolls advertising with limited success. People want their video and they want it now and they expect the web to be free of annoying commercials that plague TV.

The best way to pitch this crowd is to promote to them when they aren’t actually on the website and heavily engaged in the content. How do you do this? Through an email list of course. Make a strong offer on your website to sign up for "free update notices" that will keep your visitors apprised when you post new content. This obviously gives you an opportunity to market your offers without the distraction of your great content.

Creating a humorous free website can be a lot of fun, just understand the challenges you will be facing if you are going to try and make a buck off of it.