Apparently the College Humor website and platform is dead. Just about everyone laid off. No new content coming. The company that bankrolled them pulled out.
I’m not quite sure I understand what happened. I’m seeing things that Facebook pulled some shenanigans which led to the collapse. Something about lying about how many page views videos got in order to entice them to post of the platform. I don’t know if I’m getting it right.
I liked a lot of what they did. The Batman shorts. Adam Ruins Everything. The main cast was likable. There were other shows I would have followed if they hadn’t decided to put them behind a paywall. They kind of lost me there.
It’s really just one more downstream effect of the collapse of the advertising industry. Yes, there’s a lot of advertising out there, but it’s not enough money to justify large-scale video production. Generally, when a print/online pub begins committing to videos they’re on the long downward spiral. Yes, you can blame Facebook. There’s a certain amount of truth to that. But an equal share should be placed on the collapse of the price of advertising and the use of ad blockers.
You can’t be ad-supported if no one sees your ads or the ads have very little impact.
Hell, would you guys mourning College Humor pay $20/month to access the content? Because that’s what it’s coming to in not too long. You want that content, you’ll have to subscribe to it to make sure it can be produced.
The future is a variation on Kickstarter or Patreon, not banner ads.
I’d say an alternate future would be Netflix making a move to incorporate short-form video in order to help distinguish them from Disney+. It’s not what people think of Netflix doing now, but there’s no reason they couldn’t expand their model to allow easy search, recommendations and playback of 3-5 minute videos. They’ve certainly got the money to easily cover typical Cracked/College Humor production budgets.
I don’t know if I’m mourning. I was confused as to what happened.
College Humor already had a pay service Dropout.tv. There were a couple of shows that I was interested in like Um, Actually and Total Forgiveness. They were not enough to get me to pay for yet another streaming service. Like I haven’t for DC or CBS. I really wonder what the landscape is going to look like in a few years. I can’t help but think that eventually there will be a consolidation.
Interestingly, most of the Cracked stuff can be found on Amazon. At some point them must have cut a deal there and it’s ongoing.
But really, it’s the production costs that kill you. Advertising simply can’t support it. That’s why every time I see a local newspaper or magazine committing to video and installing a production studio I know they’re on the long slow slide to oblivion.
The secret in content generation in the 21st century is keeping your costs down. I mean hammer it down. I used to own two newspapers and I managed to sell them at a profit in 2010 because I made a profit. But I did that through sharing resources between the two, using a lot of cheap freelancers and keeping the newsroom small. That and being very highly focused on local news. I knew I couldn’t compete on national stories so why bother?
Consolidation would not surprise me. It’s happening in print right now - that and billionaire angels - and could happen in television. TV and video gets less for ads now than previously - barring events like the Superbowl - and paying those salaries is going to be no longer feasible.
Regarding ads, adblock, etc. Why can’t you put the ads directly on the page instead of making it a separate element? Some YouTube videos do this, making the ad part of the video.
A lot of the humour that was popular in college newspapers and with students when I went to school, not very recently, would not be considered vaguely acceptable today. Some of them were objectively offensive, so I am NOT judging.
Times have changed. I know (American) professors who won’t make jokes because they fear they will be taken too seriously. There are comedians who won’t do the college circuit.
It has been a long time since I checked that site. But could it just be tastes and sensibilities have changed?
You can (Facebook does it) but it requires a lot of technical resources that smaller operators may not have. You need to set up your own system for serving the ad content, convince advertisers to put stuff up on your system and pay you for it, and accurately track exposure numbers in a manner that your advertisers will trust.
OTOH, signing up for an existing ad network gives you immediate access to a large pool of customers and you can rely on the ad network for accurately managing the viewership metrics and collecting payment. And if they screw up, the liability is on them and not you.
At 52 college was long behind me when the site was first created. I didn’t know it then but since I did become aware of it there wasn’t anything collegey about the site or the humor. It’s just a name. The performers are far past college age. They come from places like UCB. The humor tends more towards nerd culture than anything. It’s certainly not targeted strictly at college audiences.
At least that is what the ad networks want you to believe. In this case (supposedly) Facebook was lying about the viewership numbers, and College Humor suffered the consequences.
Yeah, perhaps that’s ok though. Perhaps the ‘safe space’ and ‘trigger warning’ crap has gotten too much in a facility that is supposed to foster mature informed introspective adults. Though I do wonder if the world isn’t just changing Like it always has and some older comedians are discovering that their material doesn’t work on a college campus like it does on the blue collar dive bar circuit.
Ever watch Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee? A famously funny comedian is just out of his element in cringeworthy interviews with funny people who don’t have an issue on college campuses. Dave Chappell also has beef with college audiences, but his latest Sticks & Stones is just outright bizarre. Both don’t offend me or anything, they just seem like wealthy people who have lost touch with their ‘common man’ voice and blame everyone sitting for it.