CarambaTV.ru

» see carambatv.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

CarambaTV.ru launched on 29 November 2010 as a place to put one show. The show was +100500, in which Maxim Golopolosov sat in a small room and shouted at internet videos, and it was already large enough that a website built around it could support a company. Within three years the company had become a studio with forty-three programs on its schedule, one of which was BadComedian, Evgeny Bazhenov's long-form demolition of Russian cinema.

The economics worked for a while, which was unusual. Russian web video in the early 2010s mostly ran on enthusiasm and a YouTube partner check, and CarambaTV was doing 116.3 million rubles of revenue in 2013 with around 120,000 unique visitors a day coming to the site itself rather than to the embeds. Eighty people were on the payroll. That combination is what attracted a buyer.

STS Media bought 51 percent of the studio in 2015 for 148 million rubles, which included both carambatv.ru and 100500.tv. The founders stayed for eighteen months and then stopped. In January 2017 Golopolosov, program director Petr Sivak and former director Mikhail Orlov sold their remaining shares and walked, citing disagreements with the broadcaster that had run through 2015 and 2016. Golopolosov said at the time that they would hardly continue without him and that winding production down had already been discussed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

What CarambaTV had that a television company wanted was a schedule: an actual slate of programs with fixed hosts and release days, produced in enough volume that a viewer could build a week around it. STS was buying a habit, and in 2015 that habit was real.

It stopped being real quickly. Desktop and mobile views on the site halved over six months, from 4.7 million in July 2016 to 2 million in December, while the shows themselves kept their audiences on YouTube. The studio was being emptied out from underneath by its own distribution.

~ what really happened ~

STS Media took the remaining 49 percent on 28 July 2020. That was the last thing that happened to CarambaTV as a company. The last working capture of the site is dated 25 August 2020, it was dark on 26 August, and by 5 September carambatv.ru was returning a redirect to chetv.ru. Nobody announced anything. OOO Karamba TV was liquidated on 10 March 2021.

Of the eighty people the studio employed at its peak, seven were kept after the founders left. The rest of the number is the whole story of what the acquisition was for.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shows are fine. +100500 still posts, under a different producer and without the man whose name is in the format, and BadComedian became one of the largest things in Russian-language video without needing a studio behind him at all. What died was the idea that those shows needed an address, a site you went to rather than a channel you subscribed to.

From Turkey, this whole category of Russian web video was invisible in a way that is worth being honest about. I watched YouTube in the same years, in Turkish and in English, and the RuNet had a parallel industry of studios and hosts and formats running at scale that I only ever read about afterward. CarambaTV is the kind of company that was large inside one language and absent outside it, which is most of what the internet actually looked like once the first decade was over.

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