At least that’s the arc their employers at Discovery Communications have planned for them.

The cable heavyweight has watched the pair progress from bloggers on its “How Stuff Works” site to a duo whose twice-weekly “Stuff You Should Know” audio shows generate more than a million downloads a week.

Now it’s trying to transform them into on-camera talent, by giving them their own series on its Science Channel. And if that works, it wants to repeat the process with other digital natives.

“I think it’s a template,” says Conal Byrne, who oversees editorial operations for Discovery’s digital properties. “We can do more of this.”

Discovery isn’t the only cable network trying to mount TV shows on the backs of popular podcasts. Next month, IFC will start airing “Comedy Bang Bang,” a sketch series based on the (great) weekly improv show of the same name, hosted by writer and actor Scott Aukerman. Next year, the network will do the same thing with Marc Maron, a veteran comedian who revived his career by  interviewing other comedians in his garage.

Those shows revolve around professional entertainers who have been at it for a long time. Clark and Bryant, meanwhile, are writers who can carry on an entertaining conversation. Their podcasts work — the show makes consistent appearances on iTunes’ Top 10 podcast rankings — because they’ve got a gift for turning arcana into an hour of laconic banter. (Recent topics: What Interpol actually does; why your body odor is so unpleasant.)

But they’ve only spent a few minutes in front of the camera, mostly for a couple dozen short clips they shot for Science in the last year or so.

“We started out being terrified by TV,” says Clark. “If you go back and watch our first cable appearance, it’s hilarious. I hadn’t been that scared before in my entire life, and you can see it. I was looking off camera all the time. Chuck was rocking back and forth.”

Adds Bryant: “We’re both really comfortable in that podcast booth, with no windows and no one watching.”

Discovery isn’t rushing them. It has only committed to making 10 30-minute episodes, which are in preproduction now and slated to run early in 2013.

The network won’t talk about the money it’s spending on the project, but based on the pilot it created earlier this year, they won’t be drowning it in cash. The concept is pretty straightforward — the two guys tape a podcast, just like they always do, and the camera goes behind the scenes to illustrate its “fictional life.”

The risk is that what makes podcasts work in general — that sense of conversational intimacy  – will go away. But everyone involved seems aware of that pitfall, and insist they’ll avoid it by making a new show, not a video version of the old one.

“I think one of the mistakes that people do is that they try a television show out of something that exists online, and we never wanted to do that with Chuck and Josh,” says Debbie Myers, Science Channel’s general manager. Discovery wouldn’t provide an embeddable clip of the pilot, but you can get a sense of what they’re up to with some of the interstitials they’ve already shown on Science (see below).

The notion of taking someone who’s popular on the Web and trying to turn them into “real” media stars isn’t new. But while we’ve been talking about the idea since the mid 90s, we still don’t have that many examples. And it’s even rarer for big media conglomerates to harvest their own digital talent — usually because they don’t have much on hand to begin with.

But Discovery plans to keep Clark and Bryant generating podcasts twice a week, even as they start producing TV. For starters, Discovery is hoping that they’re able to bring some of the 500,000-plus fans who listen to the podcasts over to the new shows. Even adding 20 percent of that fan base would be a big deal for Science.

And finding talent that can work on multiple platforms is part of the reason Discovery plunked down some $30 million for Revision 3, the Web network/studio.

I’m not sure the gut-busting dudes from “Epic Meal Time” are going to be on a Discovery channel anytime soon. But if they do, they’ll already be working for the network.

But here it is: See, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell are older, healthier, and they go to Broadway shows, not movie matinees. But they’re still rapping about Rachel McAdams.

The best line, of course, is Samberg’s shout-out to Google — a reminder that he’s still waiting for a “fxxxing YouTube check” for the first “Lazy Sunday,” which NBC doesn’t allow on the video site anymore.

But Samberg’s other viral videos are all proudly displayed on a YouTube channel. And while the clip helped build YouTube into a powerhouse that sold to Google for $1.6 billion, it also helped revive SNL and build Samberg’s career. So everybody did just fine.

And here’s the original (which on NBC’s SNL page, at least, came bundled with an ad for… “Sister Act”).

We’re told by a guest of the couple authorized to speak that the ceremony happened in Zuckerberg and Chan’s backyard at their home in Palo Alto, in front of a very small number of family and friends, around 100.

The couple had been planning the wedding in secret for about four or five months, our source says, but told their guests that it was a surprise party for Chan’s graduation from UCSF medical school, where she just got her degree in pediatric medicine. News of the wedding was first reported by the Associated Press.

A close friend of Zuckerberg and Chan played the music for the processional, while another close friend played them off.

While the date of the wedding was timed to Zuckerberg’s birthday and Chan’s graduation, the IPO was a moving target, our source says, and was definitely not part of the whole plan.

The ring, you ask? It was simple, our source says, and Zuck designed it himself.

He went with a ruby.

Mike Isaac contributed reporting.

(Image courtesy of Allyson Magda)

As The Wall Street Journal points out, this isn’t the first time the carmaker has taken a pass on the game — it also bowed out in 2009.

But the news adds some context to the earlier Facebook news. GM is overhauling all of its ad spending plans, so if you’re a Facebook bull you might find the carmaker’s high-profile sub easier to stomach.

Mark Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters. Shares start trading around 11 am ET.

Facebook employees give their CEO a standing ovation at the start of the company’s pre-IPO hackathon, which will run through the night and finish up shortly before FB shares begin trading on the Nasdaq.

(Photo via Facebook Product Designer Francis Luu, who has a set of pictures documenting the event.)

In short, Comcast is moving from a flat cap to usage-based billing.

It is scrapping its 250-gigabytes a month cap and trying a couple different plans in its place. One version will introduce a 300-gig cap and offer additional tiers of service, with bigger caps, along with the ability to buy more chunks of data. Another version also uses a 300-gig cap and the ability to buy incremental blocks of data as needed.

Comcast, which has more than 18 million high-speed data customers, says it will experiment with the two plans in some of its territories.

It also says that in markets where it’s not trying the new plans, it will scrap its data cap entirely until it settles on a new plan.

The move comes as Comcast has taken heat about the way it treats data on some of its proprietary video services, in particular the Xfinity app for Microsoft’s Xbox console.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has argued that because Comcast doesn’t count data delivered via that service against its usage caps, it is violating “net neutrality” principles. Comcast says it’s in the clear because that data isn’t delivered via the public Internet but on its own network, and doesn’t plan on changing its policy.

Comcast executives referenced the debate as they introduced the new plans today. “There has been a little bit of noise along with the Xfinity Xbox plan,” said Comcast EVP David Cohen. But Comcast also insists that only a small handful of its users come close to using the 250-gig cap today. The company says median usage runs around 8 gigabytes to 10GB a month.

Other broadband providers, notably Time Warner Cable, have also moved to usage-based pricing. If you take the companies at their word, they’re doing it because they need to charge more money to provide more bandwidth because “our network is not an infinite resource, and it is expensive to build it,” as Cohen says.

But usage-based pricing is also a useful tool to have available if cable TV users really do stop subscribing in large numbers, and replace their pay TV packages with Web video. That gives the cable (and telco) guys a way to replace the video revenue they lose with more broadband dollars. A bonus for them: Broadband subscriptions are much more profitable than video subscriptions.

[Shutterstock/Janos Levente]

But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead, Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now, digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a backstory here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant.” Those numbers also remind me very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re “pinning,” so there’s no effective way to search for your stuff.

The company says it can solve that with image-recognition technology, which it licenses from a  third party, and an analytics engine it created itself.

Curalate’s arrival is inevitable, because every big social platform eventually spawns a set of third-party analytics/brand tracking companies — see Twitter, Facebook. But the company didn’t exist a few months ago.

Up until late last year, Gupta’s company was called Storably, and it was pursuing another hot start-up meme, as an “Air BNB for parking and storage.”

But that one never got traction and, after six months, Gupta — a Philadelphia-based Wharton grad — looked for a pivot. He and his four-man team cast around for a new idea and, after considering some 70 ideas, landed on Curalate. At the end of 2011, the company raised a $750,000 seed round from NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures.

Now Gupta says he has 150 customers, including Kraft Foods and Time Inc.’s “Real Simple,” and he charges them up to $99 a month for his services.

That will happen in the middle of 2014, says Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, when circulation growth at the paper will start offsetting the decline in the Times’ ad sales. Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

True, one reason that circ growth will lap ad losses is that the losses will be slowing after much steeper declines. Still, the best-case scenario for most old-line media businesses is that digital sales increase faster than physical sales drop, and that’s essentially what Venkateshwar says is happening here. A year after the Times introduced its pay wall, it now has 450,000 digital subscribers — a number that impresses lots of industry skeptics.

Earlier this spring, when the Times said it was making it harder to read the paper online without paying for it, by dropping its free article limit from 20 per month to 10 per month, I wondered if the Times had made the move out of necessity — because it needed to boost its digital sales — or optimism — because it was confident it could boost its sales with a taller pay wall.

But after some thought, and bouncing the idea off a few industry folks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s both. The Times would sure like to accelerate Venkateshwar’s timeline, and that’s probably not going to happen by fixing its ad problem. Meanwhile, the paper seems relatively confident that raising the pay wall equals marketing the pay wall. And the nice thing about the system the paper has built is that if it doesn’t work, it can fiddle with the controls some more.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

Capstone analyst Rory Maher thinks so. He’s been polling ad buyers and thinks they may collectively be spending 40 percent more on YouTube than they did a year ago.

He also thinks YouTube’s strategy of grouping its new channels into “genres” — like “women,” “pop culture,” etc. — and selling those as megapackages is attractive to advertisers, and that they’ve at least placed tentative commitments on all 18 packages YouTube is selling.

But those dollars aren’t going to come from TV, Maher thinks. Instead, advertisers will take money they would have spent on other Web ads and move them over to YouTube. That’s still a win for Google, but it’s not the win it really wants.

Last week’s event didn’t win everyone over. Several folks I’ve talked to — including people who are making stuff for YouTube’s channels — say they’re underwhelmed with the actual content they saw onstage at the Beacon Theater.

“It looked like Web video,” one Web video maker told me. That is, it didn’t look like the stuff the TV guys show off at their advertiser events.

Some of the stuff may get close to TV.

YouTube is brimming with pride over WIGS, a series of soapy dramas featuring actresses you’ve heard of, like Jennifer Beals and Julia Stiles (News Corp., which owns this site, had a hand in putting the series together). The teaser trailer they’ve put out looks like a reasonable facsimile of Lifetime, at least to my eyes. And Machinima is planning a series based on Halo, the hit Xbox game, and the few seconds of that they showed looked pretty slick.

It’s more likely that most of the Web video YouTube produces with its channels this year really will end up looking like Web video. But if that doesn’t bother the people who watch it — and there are some 800 million people watching this stuff every month — then it shouldn’t be a problem for the ad guys, either.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

That pitch is also fueling a whole lot of start-ups, who want to piggyback on Facebook’s ascent by helping advertisers shovel money into the site.

Today’s example: Adaptly, which manages Facebook ad campaigns and also helps marketers buy ads on other social platforms, like Twitter and StumbleUpon.

The NYC-based company has raised a $10.5 million B round, led by Valhalla Partners; the company also brought in Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo as new investors. Adaptly had previously raised $2.7 million.

The company is run by freakishly young cofounders — Nikhil Sethi, 23, and Garrett Ullom, 22, both fresh out of Northwestern (Ullom didn’t stick around to graduate). Sethi (pictured above) says his company booked $10 million in gross revenue in 2011, and will “greatly exceed that” this year. (Update: That’s actually $10 million in gross bookings, not revenue, Sethi says. Thanks to Steven Kane for the nudge.)

Adaptly has around 50 employees, a bunch of whom have migrated there via Invite Media, the ad tech start-up Google bought in 2010. The two companies share a few other ties: Both have been backed by Philly’s First Round Capital, and Invite CEO Nat Turner has invested in Adaptly as well. Small world.

(An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Invite Media was a product of the Dreamit Ventures program.)

The earnings beat is nice for AOL. Not nice: Domestic display sales, a key metric, shrank 1 percent after climbing for several quarters. That’s going to be fresh meat for AOL critics like Starboard Value.

So what happened to domestic? “Domestic display advertising revenue declined primarily reflecting a decline in reserved impressions sold, partially offset by growth in reserved inventory pricing and Patch revenue,” AOL’s release says.

Later on in the release, we get a better sense of what may have happened: AOL’s audience is melting away. Traffic to AOL’s own properties is down 4 percent over the last year.

I imagine that Tim Armstrong will tell analysts that the decline isn’t wholly unexpected, because AOL’s dial-up unit, which still powers the whole operation, continues to shrink — that archaic business lost 14 percent of its subscribers in the last year.

On the other hand, this is a full year since AOL paid $315 million for the Huffington Post (and another $30+ million for TechCrunch, a few months before). I guess Armstrong could argue that things would be worse if he hadn’t bought the new sites, but that’s not very inspiring.

Update: A quick skim through the archives reminds me that shrinkage has been a recurring problem for AOL. The company also posted a 4 percent traffic drop in Q4 2011. And in Q3, traffic was flat. When I asked Armstrong about the issue then, he did indeed argue that the new sites were fighting off the decrease from dial-up users, and also argued that the company was still integrating Arianna and company (work in progress, apparently). He also predicted that traffic would tick up over time, and it has, just a bit — AOL is up to 108 million uniques versus 107 million six months ago. Key question: Does he expect more progress? Should shareholders?

AOL’s call starts at 8 am ET. We’ll see what Armstrong has to say then.

Update: AOL blames the Q1 drop on a number of things, including a specific but unnamed advertiser that stopped spending during the quarter. But Armstrong also tells analysts that his sales team’s pitch wasn’t resonating with advertisers. “A lot of it was because we have had a display strategy that was probably off-tune,” he says, adding “I was not happy with the domestic display.”

AOL says its display problems won’t be fixed this quarter, either, and predicts another drop. But it says domestic display will start moving up again in the second half of the year.

Meanwhile, AOL defends its much-maligned Patch unit, by noting that revenues are up and expenses are down at the local-news play this year. Armstrong tells investors that Patch will hit “run rate profitability” by the end of 2013. If they give him that much time.

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”