Where do old comedians go when they retire? Like everyone else, famous or otherwise, they go to the internet. But some find new life there, too. More than 17 years since his eponymous TV show was cancelled, Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most successful – and certainly most wealthy – comedians of his generation, has found a new generation of fans, and 100 million online viewers.

Comedy is having an online moment, and Seinfeld, at 61 an unlikely visitor from the pre-internet era, is benefiting from online viewing habits. His internet show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee starts its third season on Wednesday.

The show is a deceptively casual tour of the comedian’s best attributes: quick-witted, neurotic and, above all, familiar. The premise is simple: pick up a friendly fellow comedian in a vintage car, drive around, chat, stop for coffee. He doesn’t prepare, the car fanatic told the New York Times last week, because “there’s nothing I really want to know”. Yet the show, which was initially turned down by sites such as YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, has revived interest and appreciation for a comedian whose career had appeared to be entombed in a monolith of Seinfeld reruns.

“Audience acceptance is the currency,” Seinfeld acknowledged. “It had been a while since I’d connected with an audience.”

That sense of the connection is becoming increasingly unshackled from the norms, and Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars is emblematic of a new era of freewheeling comedy-entertainment that is finding its way to consumers through a dizzying array of television, cable, satellite, internet and social media choices.

Comedy is one of the prime beneficiaries of the change. What used to be the fare of late-night talkshows is now the morning-after industry, packaged into video highlights that are replayed, shared and redigested throughout the day – or for months to come. However, while morning-after traffic may confer cultural relevance, it isn’t necessarily good for business.

It is good, though, for comedians and their fans. One of the biggest hits of recent months – with more than 30m views – was Zach Galifianakis’s interview with Barack Obama on Funny or Die, the comedy video website co-founded by Will Ferrell. Another was Ferrell lip-synching Beyoncé’s Drunk in Love on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon after the Super Bowl (42m views). Jimmy Kimmel, another late-night host, received 25m views when Obama (again) went on to do Mean Tweets, a segment in which the guest reads tweets about them.

Millions of viewers can’t be wrong, and resistance to putting television content on YouTube has largely been reversed. One of the last holdouts against the viral clip, David Letterman, retired two weeks ago. Now everyone is playing on the same, roughly level playing field of entertainment: get hits or risk irrelevance.

Amy Schumer is known for raunchy humour. Photograph: Michael Tran/FilmMagic

“The audience no longer has to sit through the show to get to the best parts,” says one TV executive. “The viral bits have become ads for the shows. The hope is people will say good things about it, or want to come on the show, or stay up to watch it. And for those people who aren’t going to stay up, this is the best chance of getting their attention.” Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, received that message, too. She recently displayed her largely unknown flair for comedy to Seth Meyers, host of Late Night, which goes out after midnight. The clip was watched by a quarter of a million people online, in addition to nearly one and a half million on traditional TV.

Culture critics fret that pursuing such success – chasing the viral dragon, as it is known – is changing the nature of comedy. It’s a charge executives largely reject. They say there’s no more a formula for a viral hit than there is for a TV hit. “It’s a dangerous rabbit hole to chase down,” says one. “People try to find the recipe and fail, while others stumble across a huge viral hit.”

Since his 12.30am Late, Late Show first aired in March, British newcomer James Corden has struggled with his online numbers – or had done until he got Justin Bieber on to do “Carpool Karaoke”. That segment has since received 20m hits, or roughly 20 times his nightly TV viewership, in a week.

That may be just a sign of the public’s enduring fascination with 21-year-old Bieber. For TV guests, as for fashion models, Instagram and Twitter followings are becoming key to desirability and value. With 60 million Twitter followers and 29 million on Instagram, Bieber sells the show, not vice versa.

Still, it’s a verifiable hit for Corden, who has perhaps been straying too close to other comedians’ material – namely the lip-synching and music spots that late-night ratings winner Fallon uses almost nightly.

Corden also believes that chasing virality for its own sake is futile. If hits were the only measure, he told Variety, he’d “strip naked and run down Sunset Boulevard”.

Another UK export, John Oliver, found his relevance dramatically raised when viewers crashed the website of the Federal Communications Commission after Oliver aired a segment urging the regulator to protect net neutrality. Now Oliver’s relatively long pieces have become a touchstone of US liberal-metropolitan sensibility.

Aziz Ansari created the critically acclaimed MTV sketch show Human Giant. Photograph: Jason Kempin/Getty Images

The pressure for online sensation has attracted criticism from certain unexpected quarters. Andrés du Bouchet, a writer for another late-night host, Conan O’Brien, tweeted his opinion of the TV/online comedy ratings wars. “No celebrities, no parodies, no pranks, no mashups or hashtag wars … and shove your lip-synching up your ass.” Du Bouchet’s boss quickly distanced himself from the writer’s opinions.

For Seinfeld, Comedians in Cars has offered a kind of salvation from the pressure of a TV hit that he most probably could never have. As he told the New York Times, audience expectation of someone they already know is almost too great.

“There’s a sense of, ‘What do you want now?’ with your next thing. ‘How much money do you want now? How much time do you want now?’”

Mindful that audiences might not want to participate in a deal that appears weighted towards a performer’s expectation of them, he decided to dispense with TV altogether and find a streaming service – the Sony-owned Crackle – to run it online. The internet success of Comedians in Cars proves that the comedian was in need of a new comedic enterprise, not a new line in comedy. It has also raised the value of Seinfeld the show itself, of which Seinfeld, the man, is co-creator – online streaming service Hulu recently paid $180m for the rights to stream all nine seasons of the show, starting next month.

But Comedians in Cars is not without ambition – Seinfeld is in showbiz, after all, and every comedian needs an audience. Crackle plans to schedule new episodes (including a pseudo-Seinfeld reunion with Julia Louis-Dreyfus) against traditional late-night TV. “If there’s no vanity, that’s the end of show business,” he says.

Tooling around in a vintage car with friends such as Jim Carrey, Jon Stewart, Sarah Jessica Parker or Tina Fey, then putting it out on the internet, is a “low-impact way of getting something fun out into the world without having to worry about networks, ratings or huge amounts of money. Plus he has control of it himself,” says the TV executive. “It’s a winning formula.”

Big hitters on the online comedy circuit

Amy Schumer

Star of TV’s Inside Amy Schumer and The Bachelorette, as well as Judd Apatow’s forthcoming film Trainwreck, Schumer is known for raunchy humour. She recently discussed sex, sexism and why women apologise for the Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think [people] want to hear a woman talk for too long. A lot of people project their mom yelling at them,” she said.

Aziz Ansari

Ansari, who played Tom Haverford in the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, created and starred in the critically acclaimed MTV sketch show Human Giant. Known for hanging out with the rapper Kanye West, he writes comedy that skews towards the risqué, including the predicament of sexting.

Jimmy Fallon

Current king of the morning-after video clip, Fallon counts six million followers on his Tonight Show YouTube channel. In February, numbers surged to 333 million. With so many people following online, the show’s parent company NBC is reportedly considering charging $2.50 a month for complete broadcasts.

Jerry Seinfeld

While Seinfeld cohort Julia Louis-Dreyfus found new success in HBO’s Veep, Seinfeld himself languished. Now he’s online with Comedians in Cars. “Dumb boldness is the best way to approach a new challenge,” he told the New York Times.

Zach Galifianakis

Started in 2010, Between Two Ferns finds the comic trading barbs with celebrities. Brad Pitt is the latest guest. Barack Obama garnered more than 30 million viewers.