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[Music] Almost everyone at CollegeHumor lost their jobs today. That was the title of a news article published in January 2020 after CollegeHumor reduced its staff from around 100 people to less than 10.
Explores CollegeHumor's rise, edgy content, corporate acquisition, talent loss, and decline leading to layoffs and reduced relevance by 2020.
Key Takeaways
- Edgy, college-focused humor initially drove CollegeHumor's success and distinct brand identity.
- Corporate acquisition enabled professional content production but also introduced new pressures.
- Loss of key talent significantly impacted content quality and audience loyalty.
- Maintaining uncensored, risky content post-Adpocalypse hurt profitability despite audience respect.
- Financial struggles and layoffs drastically reduced output and relevance by 2020.
What the video covers
- CollegeHumor started as a website in 1999 targeting college students with edgy, controversial humor.
- The site gained popularity in the early 2000s, attracting corporate acquisition by IAC for $20 million in mid-2000s.
- Post-acquisition, CollegeHumor launched a professional YouTube channel with high-quality videos and popular series like Jake and Amir.
- The channel grew rapidly, reaching over 1 million subscribers by 2010 and ranking among YouTube's top channels.
- Key talent, including Jake and Amir, left by 2015, leading to a decline in content quality and audience engagement.
- CollegeHumor maintained edgy, uncensored content even after the 2016 Adpocalypse, which hurt profitability.
- In 2020, financial troubles led to layoffs of 90% of staff, reducing the team from 100 to less than 10 people.
- Despite layoffs, viewership remained initially stable but later declined significantly after content shifts.
- The video highlights the challenges of monetizing internet comedy and the impact of business model changes on creative output.
- CollegeHumor's story reflects broader trends in digital media, talent migration, and the struggle to maintain relevance.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Layoffs Announcement
- 00:52Early Edgy Content and Audience
- 01:39Rise in Popularity and Corporate Acquisition
- 02:24Professional YouTube Channel Launch
- 03:11Growth and Popular Series Jake and Amir
- 04:48Talent Departure and Decline
- 05:34Maintaining Edgy Content Post-Adpocalypse
- 06:23Financial Challenges and Profitability Issues
- 07:10Community Support and Dropout Platform
- 07:58Current Status and Viewership Decline
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The need to lay off a whopping 90% of their workforce had come about because of financial troubles. The channel wasn't profitable. CollegeHumor had suffered from multiple changes in monetization roles. Many of their spin-off products were launched with varying levels of
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success, all while their general viewership had declined from beyond 100 million per month to around 15 million per month recently. Similar to Smosh, as covered previously, CollegeHumor actually began as a separate website in 1999. However, while Smosh saw a little
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success on their website prior to making videos, CollegeHumor was the opposite. In the 60s between 2000 and 2006, the CollegeHumor website saw massive success by posting content which was, quote, dedicated to the goofy things that college kids find funny. The fact that
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CollegeHumor's audience were college kids meant that a lot of the content and humor posted were slightly controversial, edgy, and offensive. There was a section for funny drunk college photos, offensive signs, and sexualized images in conjunction with a message on the home
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page from October 2000 which read: Attention parents and people over 32, necessary warning. We've had several complaints from parents and older people who are offended after looking at this site. Please note that the name is CollegeHumor and not ParentHumor. You
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will be offended if you explore this site anymore, so please do not proceed. Also, if you're younger than 18, some of this stuff may not be appropriate. We understand that by saying this we're drawing more under-18 kids into the site, but oh well. Oh, and don't try stuff you see on here at home. Thanks. This message gives us a pretty good insight into the image that CollegeHumor was going for. It seemed as though they almost wanted to wrestle some jimmies in order to show
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their users that they were willing to push boundaries, and it worked extremely well. Our third month, we got a check for eight thousand dollars for really, you know, minimal traffic, and I remember that was sort of like the moment where I
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realized this is, you know, this is actually like a real thing. By the mid-2000s, CollegeHumor's Google trend graph was clearly showing the site's popularity, which luckily for CollegeHumor drew the eyes of another large corporation offering this comedy
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website the opportunity of a lifetime. Twenty million dollars. That's how much the two founders of CollegeHumor reportedly received in exchange for a 51% stake in the company. This meant that all of a sudden CollegeHumor had a bigger budget
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to work with, as well as the ability to pursue new and novel projects. CollegeHumor had been creating original videos and posting them to the CollegeHumor website dating all the way back to 2005, about a year before the acquisition by IAC.
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However, at the time, the videos were pretty basic and had a limited reach considering they were only accessible to those who happened to visit the CollegeHumor website. Their newly found corporate funding in conjunction with fresh leadership changed all of this.
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Suddenly, they had the budget and manpower to include multiple actors in their videos, which featured professional camera work and professional editing, all of which being uploaded to their newly launched YouTube channel called CollegeHumor TV or CHTV under the
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control of their new president of original content, Sam Rush. A large portion of this new content being produced for YouTube continued on with their website's edgy, slightly offensive branding: Osama Night Live, Unsafe Sex, a series titled Clock Suckers, done
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deliberately, with one of the CollegeHumor founders stating, "We remain edgy and keep a sensibility that college kids can relate to." It took them a while to figure out what would and wouldn't work here on the YouTube platform. For
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example, by 2007, over a year after beginning the channel, the group had gained only a touch over 8,000 subscribers on top of a video queue that didn't exactly stand out as overly enticing. However, by 2009, this had
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changed dramatically. Their entire team had been plastered on their front page, showing everyone that they meant business, and if you scroll down a little bit to the video section, not only did their thumbnail show that the channel had access to professional animators, but
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they also often displayed a large cast nestled within professional video sets. From a competition standpoint, CollegeHumor's corporate media backing and access to a huge team of professionals simply put them miles ahead of every other channel at a time
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when most featured little more than one person talking into a webcam. This would then reflect in their subscriber count. In the 10 months between February 2009 and December 2009, the channel subscriber count skyrocketed from 150,000 to over
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500,000, placing them in the position of YouTube's 16th most subscribed channel. Six months later, the channel was at 1 million, and by 2014, CollegeHumor had been ranked as New Rockstars' 76th greatest channel of all time. The backbone of this growth was not only the
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professionally produced skits, as previously mentioned, but also the incredibly likable, relatable characters within the videos. Jake and Amir, who were two of the most popular characters on the channel, hosted the series in which Jake would play a logical, rational,
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calculated office worker having to deal with his irrational, annoying, odd co-worker Amir. The two would eventually release over 600 episodes of Jake and Amir between 2007 and 2015, at which point they would discontinue the series and leave CollegeHumor altogether with
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the goal of working on their own channel and podcast. However, Jake and Amir weren't the only notable characters to have left CollegeHumor, as highlighted by somewhat of a viral Reddit post in early 2017.
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What happened to CollegeHumor? They used to be so much better. Like, I know they had at least 15 actors, animations so much better, skits, and it seems as if they had a lot more money. Now there are only five-ish actors and nothing near as
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good quality. The 8,000 plus upvotes and 700 comments on the post showed that many shared a similar opinion. Jake and Amir left, simple as. And on a similar vein, I think a lot of their top talent moved on to bigger and better things.
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Instead of leveraging that alumni network and doing better, it seems they decided to take on the BuzzFeed model of business, and so they suck now. The comment relating to CollegeHumor taking on BuzzFeed's business model was partially true. CollegeHumor didn't have a
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super strong political flavor in the same way that BuzzFeed did. There was certainly a slight political bias with many videos criticizing America's president. However, most of these videos were pretty mild, done in the name of comedy, and didn't give you the idea that
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they were trying to have an impact on the next election in the same way that BuzzFeed did. The other thing that set CollegeHumor apart from BuzzFeed was that CollegeHumor kept their content somewhat crude and offensive even after
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the Adpocalypse in 2016. CollegeHumor kept the uncensored swearing and edgy topics alive, which the audience respected as it's simply less common, and it shows that you're willing to take a risk in order to keep the content authentic. However, in the case of College
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Humor, it may not have been a risk worth taking, as in 2018 they would reveal that it was severely hurting the channel's profits. It came in a video titled How the Internet Is Ruining Comedy, posted on the 27th of September 2018, in which the
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CollegeHumor director Sam Reusch would state, "Making internet videos is challenging, mostly because it pays dick, and dick doesn't pay for internet video." The CollegeHumor channel was still performing quite well at this point, gaining around 80 million views a month.
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However, each video was only on average between three and six minutes in length, which may not have been bringing in...
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however each video was only on average between three and six minutes in length which may not have been bringing in enough money to cover the wages of over a hundred staff later in that same video collegehumor would add that nowadays
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many of our youtube videos are deemed controversial and don't make any money showing that on top of the videos already being short many of them weren't being monetized at all for this reason collegehume would launch a third party
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subscription website called dropout on which they could post all their uncensored content for free marketing it as it's like netflix but worse and cheaper now it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to find data on how popular dropout tv was or is but
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it didn't seem like it was a failure there were comments on the introductory video over two years after dropout's release dating i have been subbed for the site since this video was released and i haven't regretted it once i really
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love these guys dropout is so worth it there is so much to explore and deep dive and i want to support everyone at collegehumor and keep them going and creating best purchase i have made in ages honestly dropout is so worth it
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it's cheap and i have tons of hours on my favorite comedy shows it seemed as though dropout tv was helping college humor get to a position of profitability however such a goal was going to be much harder to achieve after the date of
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january 8th 2020 collegehumor's parent company pulled its funding laying off more than 100 employees and leaving a longtime executive to run the company on his own the title to that article summed up the situation perfectly the parent company of collegehumor iac had pulled
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its funding from the channel resulting in the layoff of 90 of its staff collegehumor's director sam reich would announce the news to his twitter in a tweet stating iac our parent company has made the difficult decision to no longer
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finance us today a hundred plus brilliant people lost their jobs some of whom are my dear dear friends the twist however is that iac has agreed to let me run the company myself in words that i'm sure are as surreal to read as they are
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to type i will soon become the new majority owner of ch media of course i can't keep it going like you're used to while we were on the way to becoming profitable we were nonetheless losing money and i myself have no money to be
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able to lose the gamer from mars made a very strong argument in relation to this last tweet in his video discussing the college humor layoffs with over 20 years to start making money how much longer did the team expect for financial
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backers to invest in this content before they'd be justified in cutting their losses it's a very good point if the website began in 1999 was funded by iac in 2006 and was still unprofitable by 2020 14 years later iac were probably
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getting pretty sick of waiting around for the project to take off the gamer from mars then goes on to state another thing their lack of profitability would likely be acceptable if the business was growing yet all signs showed that things
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were actually going in the opposite direction their google search volume was down tremendously alongside their youtube viewership which had also taken a dive since the early days of the channel after 14 years without profitability in a business that was
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seemingly headed in a negative direction it's hardly surprising to hear that iac eventually decided to pull the plug however things certainly weren't over and unexpectedly the removal of iac's funding might have actually been a blessing in disguise in the 12 months
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prior to iac pulling its funding working with its full team of 100 employees the channel gained a total of 457.6 million views equivalent to 38 million per month however in the 12 months after iac pulled funding with a
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smaller budget and a team of between only 5 and 10 people the channel gained a total of 468.2 million views equivalent to 39 million per month meaning that there was really no change in viewership after collegehumor's 90 staff layoff you'd
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think that it would be chaos disorder complete and utter pandemonium following the loss of 90 of your workforce however perhaps it made things more simple streamlining the content creation process while getting rid of people who seemed important yet might have just
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been holding things up or adding insignificant changes without anyone realizing when looking at the content itself it didn't seem like much had changed after their funding was pulled sam reich stated that some of their projects will need to take on bold new
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creative directions in order to survive also as previously mentioned i can't keep it going like i used to yet when comparing the content to before then after the removal of their funding there's seemingly very little difference so perhaps they were simply able to keep
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up the same level of quality only with fewer people well for some time the 39 million average monthly views throughout 2020 has since declined to around 15 million per month which began after a radical content shift approximately six
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months ago collegehumor uploaded a video titled no laugh newsroom in which characters have to read a hilarious script and whoever laughs the most loses prior to this video the content uploaded to the channel was fairly diverse covering a bunch of different topics
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however in the last six months collegium has uploaded nothing but no live newsroom videos while these are fairly hilarious the graph seems to show that the lack of novelty is hurting the channel's overall viewership yet it's hard to call collegehumor a failure they
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are still getting pretty reasonable views given the size of their channel and team and it's not like they made a bunch of clear irredeemable mistakes in the same way that buzzfeed did they're just a channel that kind of ran their
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course for most businesses to lose 90 of your staff as well as your parent company funding would mean certain death yet collegehumor is still out there giving it everything they've got certainly a commendable trait [Music] you
Topics:CollegeHumorYouTubeinternet comedyJake and Amirdigital mediacontent monetizationonline layoffsedgy humorcorporate acquisitionmedia decline
