Once again, it is likely to be more popular online than on television, as it has been for all of the sketches, a striking trend for the long-running comedy show.

At its EconCeleb conference in Hollywood today, ContentNext released its list of the most influential and innovative online celebrities today.

It is an interesting and varied list that includes everyone from powerhouse Oprah (pictured here, of course!) to the bisexual sprite, Tila Tequila.

The list, in ascending order:

10. Martha Stewart (she is actually a closet geek)

9. Tila Tequila (vile, but in a good way)

8. Peter Gabriel (a longtime Web pioneer in the digital music space)

7. Radiohead (innovative band pushing Web distribution boundaries)

6. Stephen Colbert (funny online and off)

5. 50 Cent (the urban rap artist as nerd)

4. Oprah Winfrey (um, she’s runs the real world and could run the Internet if she felt like it)

3. Ashton Kutcher (not just a pretty face, but one who gets the power of viral marketing)

2. Will.i.am (for that Barack Obama mashup video alone)

1. Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy & Adam McKay (FunnyOrDie.com might not make money, but it is very funny)

The intersection–or perhaps collision is a better word–of the entertainment and technology industries continues at an ever more frantic pace.

And it’s clear the strike is putting into fast-forward efforts by writers and other “talent” to do an end run around the traditional studio system of funding and distribution.

There has been, no surprise, a lot of noise recently about writers looking for funding coming up to meet with venture firms in Silicon Valley, the results of which I remain wary still.

Nonetheless, such marriages are inevitable, as the entire content distribution system shifts to new paradigms in a likely-to-be painful transformation whose end result is decidedly unclear.

To get some clarity, I decided to pay a visit to Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital to talk about his nascent efforts in the arena with his investment in the online comedy video site, Funny or Die, which was launched last April.

Starting with a small $17,000 seed round, Sequoia and others have recently sunk a more serious $15 million in the effort. The site has yielded a few Web hits, mostly done by Kvamme’s partners and the site’s co-owners–actor Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (Chris Henchy is the third leg of the entertainment stool, although the trio has wrangled in a plethora of Hollywood’s hipper comedy elite to contribute to Funny or Die).

Mixing professional content with user-generated material makes for a pretty lively site, where videos are voted up (funny) or down (die).

Results for Funny or Die are still mixed, with big success for one with Ferrell and McKay’s daughter, called “The Landlord,” which has garnered more than 50 million views. Its follow-up, “Good Cop, Baby Cop” (see here), is also popular.

But those are the exception, of course, with several million monthly unique visitors engaged for about five minutes a visit.

But Funny or Die is definitely doing a lot better than some other failed efforts in the genre, such as NBC’s DotComedy.com, Time Warner’s This Just In and Time Inc.’s Office Pirates. Current competitors include sites like CollegeHumor and the Onion, although each one has a taken approach.

Funny or Die’s will be to expand to new areas, such as a recent site on skateboarding and other extreme sports fronted by Tony Hawk called Shred or Die and another one called MyBlueCollar, focused on redneck comedy. Eat or Die–using famous chefs–is next.

But who knows what tomorrow will bring–as the song kind of goes–in a world where few online video sites survive?

Here’s Kvamme to talk about it:

And here is the post and video of FOD investor Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital talking about the online video space.

But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags on.

Wrote Menn: “At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.”

That includes meetings with Silicon Valley VCs like Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, whose investment in Facebook gives it insight into the creation of new audiences.

The hope for the–let’s just say it, shall we–unnatural pairing of tech VCs and Hollywood folks?

That the sour lemons being thrown between studios and writers–ironically over future Internet revenues–will actually yield delicious lemonade, spurring the creation of quality online programming using the Internet’s massive distribution system that could also make lots and lots of money.

“Could” is obviously the operative word here, because–as we have noted many times in this column–very little original content created on the Web has had any true payoff yet.

Um, well, none, actually. (Save porn, which is an almost perfect content format for the Web.)

To be fair, there have been promising signs.

Ex-Yahoo exec and Hollywood player Lloyd Braun struck a deal with PepsiCo to pay for and create online content.

MySpace has been backing a range of online-only shows made by Hollywood types (although none has shown strongly increasing popularity and even seem to display worrisome declines in viewership, despite the justified potential touted by creators).

Of course, there’s the high-profile Sequoia Capital-backed and Will Ferrell-fronted FunnyorDie.com, as well as MyDamnChannel.com, from former MTV executive Rob Barnett.

And Viacom agreed this summer to create a new online entertainment studio in a 50-50 split with the creators of the popular “South Park” TV program.

Finally, Creative Artists Agency, which is the biggest talent agency in Hollywood, is apparently working with Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson to raise up to $200 million to invest in the digital entertainment sector, even as other such firms as UTA and William Morris are making similar moves.

While that is a very little amount of money considering the billions of dollars that slosh around Silicon Valley to fund things like dopey widgets and yet another movie-comparison site, it is still a start.

The presumable goal is that by creating and distributing content for the Web in a lower-cost way, many kinds of revenues could be garnered via everything from advertising to getting back investments by selling the online material to television and the movies.

That sounds like a plan, except for the fact that the current state of advertising innovation related to Web videos is quite nascent, even pre-fetal.

While a lot of companies are focusing on this and advertisers seem willing to move in the direction of more online ad spending, it will simply be a long time before these investments pay off.

Which is just not part of the no-risk-and-all-reward mentality of most players in Hollywood, who wouldn’t know a start-up unless it took their prime table at the Ivy.

In all seriousness, it seems unlikely that the high cost of production now in place in the entertainment industry would in any way lend itself to the critical need for that kind of massive shift in economics required to make online content pay off now.

Currently, studios still only grudgingly want to consider sharing ownership of content, and the talent seems even less willing to take the burden of risk required onto its shoulders.

Still, I admire all the efforts on the part of writers to not just strike, but strike out from their current comfort zone and move into the future, where online entertainment production and distribution seems obviously inevitable.

The problem is that it might take a longer while than those creators have patience for and they will prematurely abandon their efforts and return to propping up a system that is destined for, while not oblivion, then certain diminution.

So what’s needed–as in all marriages–is a crazy leap of faith, like this one from “Heroes” Peter Petrelli on NBC.

I am definitely no expert on this topic, except to say that the problem is that the delta between falling flat and succeeding is frighteningly close.

In other words, I Has No Idea what to do.