INNOVATE THIS!:MIKE and Bernie Winters were a popular comedy double act in the 1970s, a staple of Saturday night television and, like most comics, they started out as a live act. Mike, the straight man, would come out and do five minutes in front of the curtain, warming up the crowd. Then Bernie would appear, usually wearing a long fur coat and, sometimes, in their later years, with his pet St Bernard dog, Schnorbitz.

When they played the notoriously tough Glasgow Empire, Mike came out and did his schtick to complete and hostile silence. When Bernie appeared, the only sound he heard was a stone hard Gorbals accent muttering in the front row: “F*** me, there’s two of them.”

Comedy has always been the most brutal strand of entertainment: jokes are a binary form – we laugh or we don’t – and the language comedians use plays to this. Crap jokes don’t just fail, they die, and when a gig goes well they “killed ’em”.

But these years of suffering has prepared them perfectly for life in today’s media landscape, to the extent that anyone seeking a career in music, film, journalism or TV should forget university and study old Mike and Bernie Winters DVDs. Put another way, if you’re producing “content” today, you must deal with the same hard question that comics have always faced: How do you make money when what you create is so easy to rip off?

Jokes are the original peer-to-peer content. It takes time and talent to create them but they are fiendishly hard to protect from being copied or shared. Boiled down to their essence, jokes share the characteristics of news, songs, music videos or any creative idea. Unlike their contemporaries selling newspapers or books, the most successful comedians, from Bob Hope to Michael McIntyre, have been those that have solved this central dilemma and their experience offers a lesson for the rest of us.

Making money from comedy requires an ability to wrap product around the jokes they give us for “free”. Its no coincidence that the best-selling books of the last few years have been autobiographies written by comedians such as Peter Kay, Frank Skinner and Dawn French. Their books are good (and funny), but there are a lot of good/funny books out there, so there’s more to it than that.

Their fame is a platform around which they sell across different media: they’re good/funny on TV, radio, podcast, DVD and iTunes. They pack out the book festivals and fill out their own tours and a few lucky ones parlay all this stuff into sitcoms, game shows and films.

If we were trying to construct a business model for Mike and Bernie Winters today, there would doubtless be consultants selling the idea of micro-payments, a tiny fee per gag or sketch, downloadable via iTunes. Would it work? Of course not.

Instead, the comedian’s business model has evolved in line with that of the most sophisticated marketers. They offer a host of products on a price continuum. They know that comedy is not one size fits all and its practitioners have learned, from years on the road, to identify our sensitivities to value at each price point, and they offer different things to each category of buyer. From the free gags we tell our mates the next day to the €50 tour ticket, and everything in between.

The best bloggers have bypassed the old media model and are also developing along these lines. Stuff White People Like is a blog written by a young bloke called Christian Lander. The entries are a gentle poke at the pretensions of middle-class people in Manhattan. This is him on picking your own fruit: “Under these conditions, white people are expected to work leisurely with no real expectations and then they pay for the privilege to do so. In other words, berry picking is the agricultural equivalent to a private liberal arts college. It’s no surprise white people like it, because much like a liberal arts degree it feels like you’ve done real work when you really haven’t.”

Lander has parlayed his site into a sitcom and book deal, and knowing New Yorkers can be spotted wearing Stuff White People Likemerchandise around town. Similarly, a group of actors in London are working a platform called Too Big To Play, a series of high quality, funny, sketches that they've put out on the web, which no doubt will catch the eye of a BBC commissioning editor.

Comedians have always warned against over analysis of their craft – Barry Cryer once likened the process to dissecting a frog: “Nobody laughs and the frog dies”.

But as the internet changes so many people’s jobs, from travel agents and book retailers to writers and journalists, the lesson is clear. We’re all comedians now.