Chris Crum relays a very interesting question today over at WebProNews from Jason Falls: “Would Conan Work on the Web?”

It’s an interesting question, and one that I surprisingly hadn’t thought to ask yet, but an option I tend to bring up whenever a mainstream star is looking at their options.  When Don Imus was looking at expulsion from mainstream radio, Art Lindsey and I did some back of the envelope math on how much he could feasibly make with podcasting, and it was pretty attractive. Don Imus, though, is an old man and podcasting was still a nascent technology at the time, so there was no chance of it happening.

Former Man Show host Adam Corolla has seen wild success since his jump to podcasting (after the death of his former employer’s format at KLSX). The first episode of the show pegged out at 250,000 downloads, a number I’ve only achieved once or twice in my podcasting career. When podcasts monetize at between $15-30 CPM, the revenue on those types of numbers can be quite lucrative.

So why wouldn’t this work for Conan?  In a word – his format.  Most likely, if Conan were to switch to online as his medium of delivery, he’d want to keep the same hour-long format to the show, which wouldn’t fly nearly as well with online audiences, who much prefer bite-sized entertainment to long form content.

Sure, there are a great many long-form video shows that work for their audiences on the web, but in most cases, those audiences evolved over time, and are much smaller than the audience Conan has built up over the years, even in ratings slumps.  Certainly, even with better sponsor relationships and higher CPMs for video, Conan isn’t going to have the budget to retain a top-flight writing team and all the support staff that goes into making what we see every night the success that it is.

Could it work as a pared down show?  Possibly, though it would definitely hearken back to the early days of the show when Conan was just starting out at the late-show timeslot, they were young and scrappy, and were filled with characters like the masturbating bear.

Here’s the real problem – Chris Crum mentions the point we’ve brought up dozens of times here at SiliconANGLE over the last couple of weeks – convergence is here.  We saw it at CES and we predicted it more times than I can count during the predictions series.

These devices promise great things, and now is the time for independent producers to start banking on taking their productions to the mainstream … but for an established show with a guaranteed mainstream audience to bet the farm on an unproven technology? I’d have a hard time recommending that course of action, despite the fact that I’m a major evangelist for New Media. We all saw what happened to Howard Stern’s audience when he switched to satellite radio.

There is yet to be any consensus on which technology is going to emerge as dominant, so hammering out distribution to receive maximum audience penetration can be problematic.

By and large most of these living room hardware solutions are relatively unfunded, especially when compared to the mainstream.  If there was an option where Conan could have his cake and eat it too – perhaps make the concession of moving back to 12:05, but retaining the rights and licensing to put the show online himself? A highly unlikely situation, but, about as likely as Conan seeing the success with an online show with today’s technology in my view.