Links to funny online videos, pictures and the like pepper our in-boxes like so many temptations of the devil: “Cat Plays Piano!” “If Celebrities Were Fat!” or “MySpace: The Movie!” Sometimes ignored but often indulged, such viral (person-to-person) content  “Check out this bear asleep on a hammock!”  offers a four-minute vacation from work spreadsheets or school term papers. But for me it’s serious work, all those videos of wedding bloopers, photos of innuendo-laden billboards and articles about Indiana Jones’s lesser villains. As an editor of CollegeHumor.com, which attracts six million visitors a month, I know firsthand just how much work goes into wasting your time.

Well, not your time, exactly. Typical New York Times readers are over 45 and own their own homes, which is not really our target demographic. Now, the kid you’d like to kick out of the house  a son aged 18 to 24 who, say, rises for Pop-Tarts at the crack of noon, or wails on Guitar Hero III  his is the spare time we’re after. Since 1999, we’ve posted thousands of videos, pictures and articles to ensnare the wandering eyes of bored young men, and made it easy for them to pass the stuff on. That’s not to say we don’t attract the occasional female user, but traditional male comedy  the Stooge-ian variety (with fewer restraints now)  translates better online, which, in turn, attracts more male users. And all those users send us a lot  a lot  of content. Each day we wade through an ocean of submitted items, selecting only 30 or so to publish. In an age when Web sites increasingly rely on complicated algorithms to rank content, we pick our stuff by hand. This very newspaper said of us in 2007, “No one can accuse this site of not understanding Web video.” So we sure seem to know what we’re doing, huh?

To be honest, though, we don’t. Nobody in the online content business truly does.

The taste of the Internet user is as idiosyncratic as it is fickle. What is popular and funny one day could be clichéd and boring the next. (“Chuck Norris is so tough” jokes, anyone?) There are certain common traits of viral content that loosely guide our selections  it should be short, easily understood, universal, nostalgic  but for every hit sharing those qualities there are millions of similar failures, not to mention stuff that simply defies explanation. A 36-second video on YouTube of a doe-eyed Japanese girl silently staring into the camera before giving the peace sign has a baffling 2.9 million views. The Internet is a strange place.

And so my co-workers and I find ourselves paid to waste time based partly on our ability to guess what will be popular. (I say partly because the other half of the job is content creation.) Isn’t this a fun economy, aside from all the layoffs and foreclosures? It’s true: Without the benefit of a trusted formula, much of the work of picking content for the site boils down to instinct (read: guessing) mixed with analysis and a healthy dose of argument. To find oneself in a heated debate over what a young Jesus’s Facebook page would look like is odd. Odder still is to find yourself getting paid to argue over such things. Perhaps oddest of all is the degree to which arguments like this are taken very seriously. But with good reason.