NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 08: Head of video for CollegeHumor and executive producer Sam Reich speaks ... [+]
“Making internet videos is challenging,” explains CollegeHumor’s CCO Sam Reich in a 2018 video entitled “How the Internet Is Ruining Comedy.” “Mostly because it pays d***, and d*** doesn’t pay for internet videos.” Reich encapsulates a problem that has plagued mega-comedy channels on YouTube and other social media platforms in recent years— shaky revenue sources that prevent creators from doing what they do best: comedy. Unfortunately, it is a dire problem for the company he worked for and now owns— CollegeHumor.
Yesterday, CH Media’s parent company InterActiveCorp (IAC) ceased financing the humor-website-turned-major-company, resulting in over 100 layoffs that left only five to ten people working in CH Media’s Dorkly, Drawfee, and CollegeHumor brands. It is a massive blow to a company that has long been one of the staple sources of comedy on YouTube and Facebook.
Founded by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, CollegeHumor’s popularity exploded after it was acquired by IAC in 2006 and started to release video content on YouTube. The channel is responsible for many of the viral sensations of the 2010s like “Jake and Amir,” “If Google Was a Guy,” and “The Problem with Jeggings.” CollegeHumor alumni have gone on to work for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Saturday Night Live.
SAN DIEGO, CA - JULY 19: Amir Blumenfeld (L) and Jake Hurwitz speak onstage at Bobcat Goldthwait's ... [+]
Nevertheless, at the turn of the decade, IAC dropped CH Media to focus on its more dynamic holdings, according to Bloomberg. The parent company, chaired by billionaire media mogul, Barry Diller, owns several popular sites and services like Tinder, Ask.com, OkCupid, and Investopedia. While shocking, CollegeHumor’s massive number of layoffs is par for the course for comedy channels on social media platforms.
Over the past five years, Cracked.com’s parent company fired Cracked’s entire video team to cut costs, repeated rounds of layoffs left Funny or Die with less than 70% of its workforce, and the satirical Onion has bled employees as it has changed hands to Univision and then Great Hill Partners. These layoffs accompany attempts to turn these humor sites away from online video content due to YouTube and Facebook’s shifting monetization policies that have made garnering a stable source of revenue on the platform an unjustifiably formidable challenge for comedy channels.
Social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook may initially have boosted the profiles of popular comedy channels, but they now exert undue influence over them. As monetization and recommendation policies change unexpectedly at the behest of advertisers on the platform, it is the envelope-pushing comedy channels that often suffer the most. As comedian Matt Klinman stated in an interview with Vulture about Facebook and internet comedy, “The problem is that Facebook is our editor and our boss. They decide what is successful and what isn’t successful via seemingly meaningless metrics. They hide behind algorithms that they change constantly.”
Thus, companies find it preferable to pursue more predictable sources of revenue, whether it is written content, as was the case with Cracked.com, or long-form content for television like Funny or Die. Though a smart decision, it deprives viewers of fun, quality content and, oftentimes, creators of their livelihood.
“Facebook has created a centrally designed internet. It’s a lamer, shittier looking internet. It’s just not as cool as an internet that is a big, chaotic space filled with tons of independently operating websites who are able to make a living because they make something cool that people want to see.”
CollegeHumor managed to change lanes at multiple moments with minimal loss of employees but still could not find a sustainable business model. YouTube’s aggressive crackdowns on CollegeHumor’s edgier, more controversial content prompted the company to pitch shows to television networks. With a couple exceptions, these efforts did not make it past production.
According to a tweet by CollegeHumor alumni, Adam Conover, impressive viewership numbers from Facebook Watch, now proven to have been artificially inflated, incentivized the company to turn to Facebook where it was met with similar disappointment. Finally, CollegeHumor decided to break from social media platforms and networks altogether and launch its own streaming service, Dropout. Although cultivating a paid-subscriber base was a promising venture, its newness and faltering viewer engagement on CollegeHumor’s main YouTube channel prevented the company from being profitable in 2019.
CollegeHumor’s devastating round of layoffs isn’t heralding the death of the channel. Reich has promised that, as the majority owner, he will strive to revive all three of CH Media’s brands and asked fans wanting to help to remain subscribed to Dropout. After the news broke in a series of tweets from Reich, other YouTubers and network stations signaled interest in hiring any of the company’s laid-off talent. Within a day, an emergency makeshift net has assembled to mitigate the fallout in the internet comedy scene. Yet, with the factors that led to it still unresolved, the new decade may witness new stories of comedy channels struggling to navigate the opaque rules of the social media platforms on which they have become reliant. The growing success of Dropout and a “creators helping creators” culture evidenced by Mythical’s acquisition of Smosh signal that it is time for frank discussion on alternative business models for internet comedy.
