CollegeHumor shuts down • Hacker News Board

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#221

Post by offtotheraces » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #164

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…

I'd be surprised if many of these "employees" weren't actually contractors or part-time roles as is typical of institutions which lean heavily on college-attending employees who need to work around their class schedule or are purely entry level on their way to a more traditional career.

They were employees, not contractors or part-time

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#222

Post by dwild » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #183

dwild wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 clear…

Subscribers is a weak measure because some channels produce one new video a month and some produce a video or more every day that only a portion of subscribers watch.

You got a good point there, CollegeHumor only got 2/3 of views than Linus Tech Tips and their production cost are clearly higher. Should still allow to pay for a smaller staff and hope that they can get enough out of Dropout to pay for higher production. Most of what they do can be done with minimal production cost though, so there's still cut that can be done on that part I'm sure.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#223

Post by dwild » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

ShteiLoups wrote: post #176

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…

oh look, a gig economy

Most productions works like that. You create a single thing, when that thing is done, the work is done. TV shows and movies doesn't need updates or maintenance (well except Cats ;) ).

When you hire a plumber do go in your house, do you keep finding him stuff to do to keep him on the payroll?

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#224

Post by manigandham » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #203

manigandham wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're exactly the same. They sell advertising space on their own websites and get attention by giving away free content and services. Publishers also buy each others tech and advertise on each others sites. The business models are identical, just with vastly different scales.

They are platforms and content marketplaces (where the currency is attention). This is entirely different than run of the mill publishers that can't drive attention at scale. Google and Facebook can leverage their power to put entire industries out of business.

Publishers also monetize attention. Scale is the only difference, the business models are the same regardless.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#225

Post by jlodwick » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #170

CH used to run a facebook competitor called "Campus Hook". I met who would later become my wife there in the early 2000s. Online dating was yet to become mainstream, so we made up a story about how we met lest we look like weirdos. Now that app dating is a thing, we can just tell the story as it happened. Thanks, CH!

That's amazing! We started Campus Hook in 2002 (I think) but the timing was bad for a few reasons: 1. A few years early in terms of college student adoption of internet 2. A few years later in terms of founders' ages (we were seniors and didn't really care about campus dating anymore)

So happy to hear you met on there, and, apparently, are still married! Perhaps it wasn't a failure after all :)

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#226

Post by Domenic_S » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

jlodwick wrote: post #225

Domenic_S wrote: post #170

CH used to run a facebook competitor called "Campus Hook". I met who would later become my wife there in the early 2000s. Online dating was yet to become mainstream, so we made up a story about how we met lest we look like weirdos. Now that app dating is a thing, we can just tell the story as it happened. Thanks, CH!

That's amazing! We started Campus Hook in 2002 (I think) but the timing was bad for a few reasons: 1. A few years early in terms of college student adoption of internet 2. A few years later in terms of founders' ages (we were seniors and didn't really care about campus dating anymore) So happy to hear you met on there, and, apparently, are still married! Perhaps it wasn't a failure after all :)

> apparently, are still married!

10 years now, and 2 kids! Thanks so much for building it, in our eyes it wasn't a failure at all :)