It’s early days, sure, but here’s something to consider as media companies mull striking out on its own to court online video viewers. Terry Heaton of media consultancy AR&D posted a graph from Alexa data charting the daily reach of YouTube and ComedyCentral.com over the past six months since Viacom stepped up pressure to remove videos uploaded to YouTube without its permission.

The red line represents YouTube’s daily reach growth. The blue line hugging the x-axis is ComedyCentral.com’s daily reach over the same period. Perhaps the difference has something to do with how easy or how hard the two sites make it to find the video you are looking for.

It’s not pretty.

A Feb. 13 MarketWatch story based on Hitwise data from Feb. 3 to 10th came to a similar conclusion.

That hasn’t shaken the resolve of media moguls, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile media companies are stepping up the pressure, with some complaining about an unspoken policy to restrict access to Google’s upcoming anti-piracy software to identify copyrighted videos, we report.