College Humour - When WOKE went BROKE
The cannibalising of millennial culture
While reams of misty eyed think-pieces have been written about the death of Vice magazine I have seen little written on the collapse of College Humor, a collapse which I believe can be mostly attributed to millennial wokeness around sexuality.
For readers unfamiliar with the media brand, College Humor was a Millennial comedy website founded in the 1999 which enjoyed huge viral success in the mid 2000s to the early 2010s by producing short skits for Youtube.
At its heyday it had tremendous financial success, buoyed partly by its acquisition by IAC in 2006, a holding company which also owned companies like askjeeves.com and Tripadvisor. Off the back of YouTube videos College Humor was able to employ hundreds of staff in a large office in New York; many of its writers (such as Sarah Schneider and Streeter Seidell) went on to write for Saturday Night Live, America’s most prestigious comedy show (with, oddly, almost no international audience).
In 2020, after years of audience decline, IAC dropped College Humor from its holdings, selling it to Sam Reich, a long time executive (and son of the Clinton economist Robert Reich). The brand as it exists now is a graveyard, employing only seven people; the most valuable asset it holds is the ad revenue which it receives from old videos being rewatched by millennials in fits of nostalgia.
Ex-employees of the company have their own theories for what caused this precipitous decline; some of them certainly hold water. As a general trend, purely online media assets like College Humor have seen shrinking revenues since the mid 2010s, partly because of changes to video algorithms from platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But I believe there is a simpler, cleaner explanation for why College Humor, like Vice, stopped functioning as successful businesses; because the puritanical Woke revolution which swept through the Millenial age cohort like a forest fire forced them to take editorial decisions which were not commercially viable.
The earliest video posted on the official College Humor YouTube channel, now taken down, was called ‘flipping off hot girls’, 2006. It about represents America as I conceptualised of it as a child using the internet; prosperous municipalities that were clean, relaxed and warm (I thought the entire continent was a desert thanks to the 2006 game MotorStorm, and the Linkin Park video ‘In the End’), brimming with attractive people. This mild transgression of social norms mixed with celebration of the female form was a winning formula for College Humor. Below is the top eight most popular videos still live on the College Humor Youtube channel.
Browse the videos sorted by popularity here; you will find thumbnail after thumbnail of breasty women in compromising situations;
You will note that most of these smutty videos are dated to beyond ten years ago. As late as 2013 College Humor was happy to trade on vulgar sexuality, but by the mid 2010s change was afoot. The Old Guard of the writing team began to leave in droves as the company office was moved from New York to LA; Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld left the company to form ‘Headgum’ (2015), Schneider left for SNL (2011), Seidell in 2014, Gurewitch (2013). In to the void they left behind, came a new cast of writers with a distinctly Woke outlook; Siobhan Thompson, Grant O’brien, Rekha Shankar and others.
What had been a cast mostly comprised of Jewish men became markedly more diverse in race and sexuality; and this was reflected in the content. See below for a typical case in point:
Decline in relevance was precipitous. In 2010 CollegeHumor was the 11th most subscribed to Youtube channel - by 2019 it was no longer even in the top 100. Only two of the videos made by the class of 2013 made it past the 10 million view mark. ‘Dropout’, the successor company to the original brand, has not managed to hit 1 million views in the last 6 months, some even sputtering into the tens of thousands.
As someone with a digital brand in it’s ascendancy, the graveyards of these enterprises fill me with great trepidation. Sex sells; I have not quite figure out a way of integrating this fact with J’accuse’s digital offering (apart from a calamitous attempt at a second iteration of the President’s Club dinner for paid subscribers). We must always know our core audience and feed those wolves their meat; another 3000 worder on elderly diddlers and their precious vaccines.