CollegeHumor
Dropout, incorporated as CH Media and formerly known as CollegeHumor, is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles that produces content for release on its streaming service Dropout as well as YouTube. Dropout content is mainly composed of live play, such as Dimension 20, and improv comedy and panel shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise. Dropout's series often feature a rotating cast of regular comedians and performers. The streaming platform hosts original programming and does not run advertisements.
In its earlier years operating as an advertising-based business under the name CollegeHumor, the company focused on sketch comedy and scripted content which was posted to their website and later YouTube. The CollegeHumor website featured daily original humor videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted content. Some popular series produced under the CollegeHumor brand include Jake and Amir, Hardly Working, Adam Ruins Everything, Hot Date, and Very Mary-Kate.
Founded by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, CollegeHumor was owned by InterActiveCorp from 2006 until 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the website shut down. While owned by IAC, the company consisted of three main brands: CollegeHumor.com, Drawfee.com, and Dorkly.com. The current CEO is Sam Reich, a performer and former Chief Creative Officer of CollegeHumor, who acquired the company in 2020 from IAC. IAC launched CH Media's streaming service Dropout in 2018. The streaming service includes original series along with the CollegeHumor back catalog of over 1,500 videos. CollegeHumor was rebranded as Dropout in 2023.
History
Founding of CollegeHumor (1999–2006)
The CollegeHumor website was created in December 1999 by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen when they were freshmen in college. Abramson and Van Veen were high school friends from Baltimore, Maryland; Abramson was at the University of Richmond and Van Veen was at Wake Forest. They began by posting photos of themselves as well as jokes, links and other material they collected from emails circulating among college students. Within three months the site was receiving over 600,000 visitors per month and $8,000 in monthly revenue. In under a year, they received a buyout offer from an Internet company called eFront for $9 million, most of which would have been financed with stock shares. Abramson and Van Veen refused the offer and continued to grow the company themselves. Abramson said in an interview that they wanted to start an advertisement-based business, seeing the success of other ad-based websites. Their aim was to create a humor site that would appeal to the advertiser-friendly college-aged demographic.In 2001, they added Jake Lodwick, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, and Zach Klein, a friend of Van Veen's from Wake Forest. By the time the group graduated from college, the site was attracting 2 million viewers a month and the partners still had full ownership. The group moved the company to San Diego briefly before settling in New York City in 2004, where they set up shop in a 4,800 square-foot loft in TriBeCa. Lodwick and Klein founded Vimeo as a spinoff of CollegeHumor in 2004. In 2006, prior to its acquisition, the CollegeHumor website had "about six million unique visitors per month" with "revenues between $5 and $10 million".
Acquisition by IAC and expansion of CH Media (2006–2020)
In August 2006, Abramson and company sold 51% of Connected Ventures, CollegeHumor's parent company, whose properties include CollegeHumor, Vimeo and BustedTees, to Barry Diller's IAC for a reported $20 million. After being discovered by CollegeHumor Media in 2006, Sam Reich was hired as Director of Original Content. He was then promoted to President of Original Content along with the premiere of The CollegeHumor Show on MTV in 2009. While IAC was focused on CollegeHumor's growth, Max Willens of trade magazine Digiday said that CollegeHumor "was only intermittently profitable" throughout its history. The company started to sell merchandise in 2004. In 2006, it began developing original video content, and by 2009 it was licensing original long-form programming to streaming platforms and television networks.CollegeHumor became known for its original comedy content. The site was nominated for the Webby Award in the humor category in 2007, and many of their individual videos have been nominated for, or won, Webby Awards: winners include "Pixar Intro Parody" for Best Animation, "Web Site Story" for Best Individual Short or Episode, and Jake and Amir for Best Series. Their shorts "Awkward Rap" and "Hand Vagina" were nominated for the Webby Award for Best Comedy: Individual Short or Episode in 2008 and 2009.In 2010, IAC launched Dorkly as a sister website to CollegeHumor; this brand focused on fandoms and video game parodies and was edited by CollegeHumor staff.
In 2014, IAC merged its CollegeHumor with its production company Electus, consolidating its digital studios, production companies, and web entertainment properties. Under Electus Digital, Reich founded CH Media's offshoot production company Big Breakfast, and moved CollegeHumor's video team to Los Angeles. That year, Drawfee was also spun off into its own channel. In December 2014, Fortune
CollegeHumor began to use Facebook as a platform for videos which, in 2017, had a higher reach than YouTube. However, Facebook never delivered the expected revenue which led to a pivot towards developing a subscription service "by mid- to late 2017" to "better monetize its audience". Video production staff were split – the staff for Big Breakfast, which focused on production licensed to third parties, was reduced to six people while the upcoming subscription service had a staff of over 60 people.
On September 26, 2018, CH Media launched Dropout, a subscription service that includes uncensored and original video series, animations, and other forms of media including comics and fictionalized chat conversations.
In October 2018, IAC sold Electus, which included Big Breakfast, to Propagate Content. On January 23, 2019, CH Media announced on the Dorkly homepage that they would be ceasing the publication of new articles and comics on the Dorkly site in favor of shifting to other platforms for new material, citing increased costs of the website and the decline of ad based revenue for publications such as Dorkly.
Acquisition by Sam Reich and rebranding to Dropout (2020–present)
On January 8, 2020, it was announced that IAC was selling CH Media to its Chief Creative Officer, Sam Reich, resulting in the job loss of nearly all employees and staff. Reich said in 2024 that he had paid nothing for CH Media, as IAC's aggressive approach towards quickly selling the company had resulted in it receiving very few offers. The restructured company was reduced to seven people; Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dungeon Master of the series Dimension 20, was the only creative left on the payroll. Bloomberg News reported that, "IAC will keep a minority stake in the business, according to a person familiar with the matter". Reich clarified that the company would continue releasing pre-recorded CollegeHumor productions on its streaming platform Dropout for at least the next 6 months and stated that he hoped to use that time in order to "save Dropout, CollegeHumor, Drawfee, Dorkly, and many of our shows". Knibbs commented that "Reich is beloved within the CollegeHumor community—WIRED spoke with more than a dozen former employees, and the praise was unanimously effusive, rare for someone who just laid a bunch of people off".In July 2020, a Dropout.tv newsletter noted that production had begun on new seasons of various Dropout shows. The company continued to upload content on the CollegeHumor YouTube channel. Also that month, it was announced that Drawfee was to be spun off into an independent company, owned by creators who had previously lost their CH Media jobs. In December 2020, Reich commented that:
We saw this opportunity to sort of right size it. 'Okay, if the expensive content isn't moving the needle, maybe that opens up a window for us to do a less expensive version of this.' And it's that pitch that we made around town to try to sell CollegeHumor. And it's only when no one took us up on that offer that I went 'you know what, I think I believe enough in this to try to do it myself.'In July 2022, PC Magazine commented that the current slate of shows still reflected the January 2020 reduction "to a skeleton team with far fewer resources and full-time staff to create original content. When it comes to new, weekly shows these days, it's basically all Breaking News improv bits and game shows. There's also an incredibly heavy emphasis on the popular tabletop role-playing game show Dimension 20". In May 2023, it was announced that Dorkly was to be spun off into an independent company, owned by Lowbrow. The announcement was made on the various Dorkly social media accounts, including Instagram and Twitter.
On September 26, 2023, it was announced that the branding of CollegeHumor would be retired, in favor of Dropout. This included rebranding the CollegeHumor YouTube channel to the Dropout YouTube channel. Reich stated that, "More people who are active fans think of us as Dropout than CollegeHumor now, and this message is almost for everyone else". On moving away from the CollegeHumor style of shortform sketches, Reich highlighted that was in part due to the transition from advertisement-based video on demand to subscription-based video on demand as they felt they "needed to offer something more meaningful". The SVOD model also allows Dropout to have editorial freedom as AVOD platforms such as YouTube and TikTok have a "censorship issue" – Reich claimed many topics may result in being "marked as not safe for advertisers" so the ideal content for these platforms is "a little milquetoast". In 2023, the company did its first profit sharing with anyone who made at least $1 with the company during the year. In early 2024, Reich said that Dropout had twenty employees, up from fifteen in 2023 and with plans to continue that slow growth to 25 by the end of the year.