CollegeHumor

» see collegehumor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

American college is a genre before it is a place. The dorm and the roommate you did not choose are props that American comedy had been using since before I was born, and a Turkish university between 2003 and 2010 had none of them anywhere near it. My English was good enough to read CollegeHumor and never quite fast enough to arrive at the joke on time.

It started on 7 December 1999. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen were two friends from Baltimore posting links and jokes for other undergraduates, and inside three months the site was pulling 600,000 visitors a month against about eight thousand dollars of revenue. By 2006 it was closer to six million unique visitors a month with revenue somewhere between five and ten million dollars, and that was the year IAC bought 51 percent of the parent company for twenty million.

The parent company was called Connected Ventures, and it is the part of the story that gets left out. Under that roof, next to a t-shirt business, two of the engineers spent late 2004 building somewhere to put video clips that did not belong on the main site. They named it Vimeo. IAC's twenty million bought the joke site and it also bought that.

The video years were the good ones. Once broadband was normal the site stopped being a link aggregator and turned into a production company with a sketch schedule, and for most of the following decade the CollegeHumor channel was one of the reasons a person opened YouTube at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the eighth of january ~

On 8 January 2020, IAC said it was done paying. More than a hundred people were laid off that day. Sam Reich, who had joined in 2006 and built the video side of the company, took primary ownership and paid nothing for it, which tells you what a twenty-year-old comedy brand was worth to a holding company by then. What remained was a staff of about seven.

The website did not get a funeral. It stopped producing and then became a redirect pointing at the YouTube channel, so anyone who typed the address afterward was quietly sent somewhere else.

What is unusual here is that the company did not go down with the site. Reich had launched a subscription service called Dropout on 26 September 2018, ad-free and paid, on the reasoning that advertising money for internet comedy was never coming back. He turned out to be right, and the seven-person version of the company kept making shows on it.

~ what the name was worth ~

On 26 September 2023, five years to the day after Dropout launched, the CollegeHumor name was retired. The YouTube channel was renamed and a brand that had been online since 1999 was folded into the thing it had paid for.

The arithmetic underneath all of this is the part worth keeping. IAC put twenty million dollars into Connected Ventures in 2006 and got two assets out of it. One was a comedy site it eventually handed over for free after fourteen years. The other was Vimeo, which IAC spun out as its own public company in May 2021 at a valuation in the billions.

So the joke site paid for the video host, and then the video host outlived it by a margin nobody involved could have predicted in 2004. There is no moral in that. It is just what happened to a page two friends made for people living in dorms.

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