I’ve longed to see the actual statistics on viewership for Hulu and Netflix’s original content efforts, so I was exceedingly interested to see Deadline’s first roundup of how many people are watching the YouTube channels the company stood up with programming seed money. The numbers are revealing.

Geek and Sundry, the Felicia Day-branded channel meant to build off the success of her web show The Guild, has attracted a proportionally huge amount of media coverage and buzz. But it was only the 16th-most watched channel on the site last week, netting 728,453 views (it was 13th previously). The most-watched channel, Sourcefed, which quickly wraps up viral news stories, was number one for the second week running with 5,607,921 views, a number that would have any actual network other than NBC feeling chest pains. The numbers drop off quickly after that: the channel with the number two slot has 3.8 million views, and only the top 11 channels netted over a million clicks on the play button. These are sobering numbers for folks who’d like to see network and cable television get outcompeted by the web. And they’re a cautionary tale for those who’d like to see their favorite shows, like Community, slip the yoke of a conventional production company and be supported by viewers: it’s a reminder that the core audience for any given show who would follow it off their televisions, much less support it with their dollars is not actually equivalent to its Nielsen rating.

Perhaps these numbers will improve. I continue to think that bundling web series together makes a lot of sense so people can find a number of things they might like at once, and so shows like The Guild, Husbands, or The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with comparatively large followings can be used to launch new efforts. This is a medium is barely in its infancy, it’s really still in gestation, and the vast majority of consumers haven’t even thought about seeking out new original programming online much less figured out where to find what they like.

But I still think this illustrates a point I made in On The Media this weekend. I really think the networks would be smart to start using web television as a farm system. A season of web television usually adds up to about the length of a pilot. If a motivated web audience finds a show and proves willing to keep coming back for the bits and the pieces of a pilot over a period of time, that might be a good indicator that a core audience exists for a show that a network can build on, rewarding legacy viewers with higher production values, and putting a promising concept in front of an audience that didn’t even know it was out there to hunt for. If the networks were smart, they’d be excited about the idea of all these people shooting test pilots for them for free and developing audiences for them before they have to spend a penny of their advertising budgets, even if they don’t care about good ideas. And as much as I like the idea of the networks having more competition, it’s not time to give up on conquering from within either.

YouTube’s plunged into interesting and uncharted waters by announcing that it will shell out $100 million to a variety of creators ranging from Slate to Ashton Kutcher to develop 100 web television channels. Creators will get up to $5 million to program the channels as they wish, and if they earn back that start-up capital and make more, they’ll make money on the project.

There are, of course, a lot of silly contenders in there. I’m not sure we actually need an American Hipster channel (the fact of its existence probably renders it hopelessly passe, right?), or if Pharrell Williams or Shaq can support their own brands, though if the latter succeeds, maybe we can persuade Peyton Manning to give up football for buddy comedies. One would imagine the Onion doing just dandy — their Onion News Network videos are often, if not always, some of the funniest things on the Internet and it’s possible to see this becoming just another way to aggregate their content.

But what’s exciting about this is that it’s a low-cost way to experiment with niches that aren’t necessarily big enough to justify the investment and start-up costs on television. I’ve often lamented the fact that there isn’t a female equivalent of Louis C.K. getting money from a cable network to produce a tough, low-budget show, but Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party network might just be it. I absolutely cannot wait to see what the women involved along with Poehler (and if they haven’t though about it, they might bring on Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl as an addition to their roster) come up with. There are, of course, spaces where women get to experiment with art and comedy, but they’re fragmented, and there are women who get to do their own thing in a network context if they’re Tina Fey or Whitney Cummings, but the idea of a reasonably well-financed place where women can make weird, engaging comedy, where the operative word is Smart is so wonderful it makes my heart explode. Similarly, I’m excited to see what folks do on channels like The Nerdist, SB Nation, and TED, if only because it doesn’t really exist in my frame of reference that places like that could get as much support and bandwidth, and that is marvelous.

Not all of these networks will survive, but when they do and don’t, we’ll actually have some sense of what does and doesn’t work, what theoretically untapped audiences do and don’t exist. This is a chance to organize ourselves and show support for the kinds of networks we actually want, with a ratings system that will likely be vastly clearer and simpler than the Nielsen ratings system. And that’s exciting.

And this is also a chance to figure out what a web TV network looks like. Is there 24 hours of content a day? Do networks find existing web series like Husbands and syndicate them? Will the workforces be unionized (the Writers Guild East is working on a campaign for web writers and from what I understand, doing pretty well)? Will the networks become a breeding ground for network pilots, a kind of minor leagues? Or will they develop their own storytelling vernacular, their own sense of timing? I have absolutely no sense of the answers to these questions. But the fact that we’re going to have a well-financed lab to try to figure some of them out is pretty awesome.