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CollegeHumor shuts down

washingtonpost.com

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Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#171

Post by dwild »

jjeaff wrote: post #162
dwild wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses. Is it really life support? Or simply, what is always should have been? Do you really need 100 staffs for College Humor? For the production side, sure you may need quite a bit of staff for each individual production, but once a production is done, you no longer need them, but you still have to pay them. How long you'll have t…

Seems like a dramatic announcement if this was just a big downsizing. Seems more like a shut down with a few hail Mary moves to try to turn it into a big downsizing.

> Seems like a dramatic announcement if this was just a big downsizing.

A dramatic announcement? Their announcement was a few tweets on Sam Reich personnal twitter, which ends with this sentence: Independent comedy lives on -- just now more independent (gulp) than ever before.

What's dramatic was all the interpretations from everyone else (which does makes sense to see 90% layoff as something dramatic).

This is clearly a shutdown for IAC (though seems like they kept a minority stake, so they probably still have a tiny sliver of hope), but from my interpretation, this is simply a big downsizing for Sam Reich.

They got 15m+ total subscribers over a bunch of their channels, that's enough to support a team much bigger than 10 employees (Linus Media Group can support 30 with 10 millions subscribers) and on top of that they got Dropout.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#172

Post by eyeinthepyramid »

ErikAugust wrote: post #61

CollegeHumor did not shut down, from the article itself: “In words that I’m sure are as surreal to read as they are to type, I will soon become the new majority owner of CH Media,” said Reich, a longtime executive at CollegeHumor. “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 able to lose.” Dr…

The website is gone, it just redirects to a Youtube account. For all intents and purposes, it's shut down.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#174

Post by rhizome »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #79
synlatexc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB's measure of views was dubious (3 seconds, even if the audio was off). So the #s looked great for them, but in reality the majority of views were just glimpses as people scrolled through their news feed.

I don't understand why publishers moved everything wholesale onto Facebook without doing some research Why not put up a few videos and compare ad revenue? When it didn't add up they could just move back...

What research? Facebook made $18B the year they pushed pivoting and they're a one-stop shop for eyes. Hard to make the business case under traditional principles to keep the status quo.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#175

Post by rhizome »

wmil wrote: post #93
shawabawa3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why publishers moved everything wholesale onto Facebook without doing some research Why not put up a few videos and compare ad revenue? When it didn't add up they could just move back...

They were selling their own ads based on Facebook's numbers, then had to refund advertisers when they found out the truth.

This is a good point, that Facebook decided to pollute their clients' revenue streams with fraud, and the clients had to pay the price for that.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#176

Post by ShteiLoups »

dwild wrote: post #138
Waterluvian wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. How is that not "shutting down"? It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses. Maybe this is a Ship of Theseus kind of thing. They get rid of almost all employees, empty the pipeline, and then retool. What's left of College Humor?

> It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses. Is it really life support? Or simply, what is always should have been? Do you really need 100 staffs for College Humor? For the production side, sure you may need quite a bit of staff for each individual production, but once a production is done, you no longer need them, but you still have to pay them. How long you'll have t…

oh look, a gig economy

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#177

Post by veb »

eitland wrote: post #163
trickjarrett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything guy) tweeted a good thread that explains this: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120

If I read this correctly I'm not the only one who shys away from video content? If this is the fact, does that mean we can get plain text back?

Talking about an interesting side-effect about videos in social media in recent times is they've learned to put text (or captions) in their videos for people (because they might have sound off) which made it far easier for deaf people to understand them! For which I am glad, but I barely use Facebook these days at all - just messenger.com

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#178

Post by rhizome »

HeroOfAges wrote: post #123
shawabawa3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why publishers moved everything wholesale onto Facebook without doing some research Why not put up a few videos and compare ad revenue? When it didn't add up they could just move back...

When you can objectively measure results, you'll often find that the people making decisions in an organization aren't as competent as they seem. It's a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most of the people you have to take orders from didn't get to where they are through intelligence, hard work and character.

Hence "networking" being one of the most persistent pieces of advice under job-hunt posts.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#179

Post by rchaud »

pfranz wrote: post #118
rchaud wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform giveth, platform taketh away. There used to be a time where you actually had to go to collegehumor.com to watch the videos. Once everyone turned into sharecroppers on FB, Youtube or whatever, this was the risk they took.

Eh. I think that's a bit of oversimplification. I work in computer graphics. All of the "old school" companies (been around for 30+ years; Pixar, Blue Sky, DreamWorks) wrote their own renderer/compositor and other tools because they had to. Today most of those companies have shed (or spun off) most all of their proprietary core software. A very few companies (Sony and Disney) have developed newer generations of rende…

I remember watching videos on CollegeHumor.com back in 2008 or so, well before Facebook video. The videos worked fine then. They made the leap to FB because they saw their traffic disappearing as aggregators (FB, Twitter, Reddit) started creating a walled-garden UX discouraging users from leaving their site.

Beyond a couple of viral videos, I don't think I've ever watched anything else from them, so I can't say I know what their competitive position was. I do know that the quality of their video platform was not the issue.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#180

Post by ViViDboarder »

z3phyr wrote: post #75
madamelic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree strongly. Maybe some of their skits had bro humor but it always seemed like either generic humor or geek centric than anything.

What is bro humor? Just see random memes on initial google search.

Drunk photos and stuff like that. Maybe Brohemian Rhapsody? Though that was young in cheek.
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