INTERNET - Viacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online - Switching gears, it will provide free views of the program in a bid to generate ad revenue.

In the ongoing quest to make Internet popularity pay, Viacom's Comedy Central channel today will unveil a website for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" that's designed to satisfy the most avid fans of the mock-news show with oceans of free video clips.

Rather than providing just a sampling of the program's fare, as Viacom and other TV networks have done for years, Comedy Central is offering the works: about 13,000 video clips representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception.

The site (www.thedailyshow.com) is meant to pull in advertising money from Day One, but it also will be something of a test lab for Viacom and perhaps for rivals looking over its shoulder.

Entertainment companies know in their bones that their material has great value to Web surfers, but so far nobody has found the right formula of unobtrusive yet effective ads.

"Comedy Central is doing what a lot of others are planning," said Allen Weiner, an analyst for research firm Gartner Inc. "They're much further along in what I would call monetization."

The database is searchable by both date and topic, making it a potential bonanza for students of American pop culture. If you want to see what host Jon Stewart has had to say about former First Lady Barbara Bush or ill-fated Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, you can find the clips and put them in context by seeing what else was featured on the same day.

Today's launch is a competitive response to YouTube. Google Inc.'s hit video-sharing site stirred Viacom's ire -- and a $1-billion copyright-infringement suit -- by allegedly allowing users to post clips of "The Daily Show," "South Park," "The Colbert Report" and other popular Viacom shows without permission or compensation.

YouTube has long said it removes such proprietary clips when owners demand it, but this week the company took a more conciliatory stance. It announced a program under which copyright holders can provide YouTube with advance copies of their programming for identification purposes. Using new software, YouTube said, it can then automatically remove clips as users post them.

Although YouTube is a foe in the legal battle, it was a catalyst for the launch of the new Viacom site. Paul Beddoe-Stephens, vice president for digital media at Comedy Central, said he had been dreaming about such a project since "The Daily Show" started.