CollegeHumor

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.[4][5][6][2] Abramson and Van Veen were high school friends from Baltimore, Maryland;[7] Abramson was at the University of Richmond[8] and Van Veen was at Wake Forest.[5][9] They began by posting photos of themselves as well as jokes, links and other material they collected from emails circulating among college students.[5][9][7] Within three months the site was receiving over 600,000 visitors per month and $8,000 in monthly revenue.[9] 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.[9] 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.[10]

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.[5][11] By the time the group graduated from college, the site was attracting 2 million viewers a month and the partners still had full ownership.[9] The group moved the company to San Diego briefly[9][12][11] before settling in New York City in 2004, where they set up shop in a 4,800 square-foot loft in TriBeCa.[5][9][11] 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.[13][14][15][16] After being discovered by CollegeHumor Media in 2006, Sam Reich was hired as director of original content.[17][3] He was then promoted to president of original content along with the premiere of The CollegeHumor Show on MTV in 2009.[18] While IAC was focused on CollegeHumor's growth,[3] Max Willens of trade magazine Digiday said that CollegeHumor "was only intermittently profitable" throughout its history.[19] 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.[19]

CollegeHumor became known for its original comedy content. The site was nominated for the Webby Award in the humor category in 2007,[20] 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.[21][22]

In 2014, IAC merged its CollegeHumor with its production company Electus, consolidating its digital studios, production companies, and web entertainment properties.[23] Under Electus Digital, Reich founded CH Media's offshoot production company Big Breakfast, and moved CollegeHumor's video team to Los Angeles.[24][23][25] That year, Drawfee was also spun off into its own channel.[26][27] In December 2014, Fortune 's Erin Griffith reported that IAC was considering selling CollegeHumor with the aim of finding a buyer who would "pay around $100 million" for the company. According to Griffith, this was part of a trend of comedy websites and other video outlets seeking to be sold after Disney acquired the Maker Studios YouTube channels for almost $1 billion.[28]

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".[19] 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.[19]

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.[29][30]

In October 2018, IAC sold Electus, which included Big Breakfast, to Propagate Content.[31] 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.[32]

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.[33][34] 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.[35] The restructured company was reduced to seven people;[36] Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dungeon Master of the series Dimension 20, was the only creative left on the payroll.[37] Bloomberg News reported that, "IAC will keep a minority stake in the business, according to a person familiar with the matter".[34] 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".[38] 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".[3]

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.[39] 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.[40][41] 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.'[42]"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".[43] 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.[44][45]

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.[1][46] 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".[46] 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 (AVOD) to subscription-based video on demand (SVOD) as they felt they "needed to offer something more meaningful".[36] 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".[36] In 2023, the company did its first profit sharing with anyone who made at least $1 with the company during the year.[47] 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.[35]

List of web series

This is a list of notable CollegeHumor series and CH Originals. Most of these series are now available in their entirety on the Dropout streaming service.

Other series

Previously, CH Originals produced The Michael Showalter Showalter, a Charlie Rose-style comedic interview series hosted by Michael Showalter and featuring guests such as Paul Rudd, Andy Samberg, David Cross, Zach Galifianakis, and Michael Cera. They also gained notoriety for Street Fighter: The Later Years, which was nominated for "Best Series" by YouTube's Video Awards.[78] In 2011, they featured Bad Dads, a series of five, three-minute shorts starring Michael Cera and Will Hines. The series was written, directed, and produced by Derek Westerman.

The CollegeHumor Show

On December 17, 2008, CollegeHumor.com announced The CollegeHumor Show, a scripted comedy that premiered on MTV on February 8, 2009.[79] The half-hour comedy was written by and starred nine CollegeHumor editorial staff members (Ricky Van Veen, Jake Hurwitz, Amir Blumenfeld, Dan Gurewitch, Patrick Cassels, Sarah Schneider, Streeter Seidell, Sam Reich and Jeff Rubin), who played fictionalized versions of themselves.

Other CollegeHumor.com content

CollegeHumor.com's pictures section featured user-submitted photographs. Like the site's videos, CollegeHumor's pictures were of a humorous or bizarre nature. CollegeHumor also occasionally held photo-based contests for its users. In 2011, Kevin Morris of The Daily Dot reported that CollegeHumor had lifted several images from Reddit without permission of the copyright holders and had added the CollegeHumor logo to these images.[80]

CollegeHumor.com posted original writing from its staff and users, including humorous essays, comics, interviews and weekly columns on sports, video games, college life, and dating. Contributing writers to the site have included notable comedians Steve Hofstetter, Christian Finnegan, Brooks Wheelan, Paul Scheer, Amir Blumenfeld, and Judah Friedlander. Andrew Bridgman curated the articles and edited the website's front page.[81]

Um, Actually

A game show — hosted by Mike Trapp and Michael Saltzman (seasons 1–8), later Ify Nwadiwe and Brian David Gilbert (season 9–)[82] — in which contestants win points by correcting untrue statements about pop culture. Contestants must begin their corrections with the phrase "Um, actually...", or risk losing the point. Guests have included Matthew Mercer, Rachel Bloom, Demi Adejuyigbe, Kristian Nairn, Doug Jones, Maddox, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, Alice Wetterlund, Lindsay Jones, Zach Sherwin, Thomas Middleditch, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Breaking News: No Laugh Newsroom

A comedy series in which four performers act out a newscast and read absurd or comedic text from a teleprompter, with points deducted each time they laugh or smile.

Dimension 20

A live play tabletop role-playing show that debuted in 2018. It primarily uses Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition rules, and usually features Brennan Lee Mulligan as the Dungeon Master.

Game Changer

A game show hosted by Sam Reich in which each episode is a different game and contestants are not told what they are playing before the show. In order to win the game, they must figure out the rules as they play. Special guest appearances have included Jewel, Michael Winslow, Ty Mitchell, Bob the Drag Queen, Tony Hawk, Giancarlo Esposito, and Eric Wareheim. Three spinoffs, Dirty Laundry, Make Some Noise, and Play It by Ear, were released in 2022. A fourth spinoff, Crowd Control, premiered in September, 2025[83].