Originally Published in Print, April 2022.
If you have spent much time on the internet, you have probably seen a CollegeHumor video. Focusing on sketch comedy ever since graduating from humorous text and image-based miscellany when it was bought by multi-media conglomerate IAC in 2006, CollegeHumor has had to adapt to the constantly changing landscape of online content production, including Facebook’s faked native video viewer figures, and numerous changes to the YouTube algorithm. One such adaptation was the introduction of Dropout, the company’s own streaming service. Fans were able to access ad-free sketches earlier than YouTube viewers, and more tantalisingly, long-form content not available anywhere else. The company was open about the difficulties in attracting brands due to the adult nature of their content, and with the popularity of audience donation platforms like Patreon, Dropout was a logical next step. If you search for the company’s YouTube channel today, you’ll see the last sketch was published eight months ago (at time of publication). But CollegeHumor lives on, thanks to Dropout. The service has become the main focus of the company since January 2020, after IAC pulled its funding and nearly a hundred people were laid off. Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich was able to buy the company with six months of programming already recorded, and continues to steer the company through the pandemic, and hopefully into the future. Outlasting much larger similar services such as NBC’s Seeso and the ill-fated Quibi, Dropout is a fascinating case study of an ‘indie’ streaming service.
Obviously, the site has nowhere near the variety of the bigger streaming services such as Netflix and Disney +, yet their prices are no less competitive, with a month’s subscription being less than a euro cheaper than streaming giant Amazon Prime. Early content on the site initially attempted to tap into millennial nostalgia, with scripted shows focusing on parodying Miss Frizzle, Star Wars, and Power Rangers. However, IAC pulling out meant that the vast majority of their shows had to be cancelled, leaving the service with only four main properties; Um, Actually, Game Changer, Breaking News and Dimension 20.
Um, Actually is a nerdy quiz show that asks contestants to pick out factual errors in descriptions of the objects of their obsession, whether that be Marvel lore or Broadway trivia. There is no prize, just bragging rights sought after enough that it’s spawned its own board game. Game Changer, also a game show, takes rules, the core of any show in the genre, and does away with them, cycling through a different game every episode and asking contestants to figure it out as they go. Hosted by Reich himself, whose enjoyment of the chaos is both palpable and infectious, Game Changer’s success hinges on its contestants, who are for the most part trained in improv. All of the effort and creativity put into developing the various games would be for nothing if guests were anxious about looking foolish or rendered inactive by confusion, which is thankfully not a problem for the experienced contestants.
The game show Breaking News casts players as news reporters tasked with reading off a prompter without laughing. This bite-size show has also recently begun to employ improv, asking guests to name their top 25 holidays or describe the plot of the Drew Carey Show from memory. Dimension 20 is without question the service’s most popular property. The only fiction show of the bunch, it is a D&D roleplay anthology show covering murder-mystery, sci-fi and fantasy with over 140 episodes to its name. Episodes are generally between two and three hours long, an impossible length for a comedy TV on a traditional network that thrives on this experimental platform. These four shows are enough to keep CollegeHumor afloat. Which of course begs the question: how?
Although CollegeHumor started Dropout after having first built up years of goodwill with their audience, not every company could turn such goodwill into cash. Many streaming services that have gone bust seem to have had the same problem as online content production companies that shared this fate – the people with the money weren’t knowledgeable about the area. Cracked, another millennial comedy site that attempted a paid subscription, was bought by E. W. Scripps, a conglomerate that has dabbled in newspapers, radio and eventually television when each medium was most popular, for $39 million back in 2016. Before two years were up, $36 million of that money was written off, and the majority of the staff were fired. The company’s YouTube channel still posts original content, with four of its five most recent videos not even reaching twenty thousand views. Investors in Quibi, a short-form streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, accumulated over a billion dollars to fund shows, but ultimately it died the same year it was launched. The people in charge were less interested in the content they were producing than the money that could be milked from subscribers. This isn’t just railing at the establishment, but the acknowledgement that consumers can tell the difference between funny and not, between programming someone was passionate about and programming that exists to justify a subscription price. In my eyes, the difference between Dropout and less successful services is evident in owner Sam Reich. On top of hosting Game Changer, he’s also directed for television, co-written a song with Weird-Al Yankovic, and appeared in numerous CollegeHumor sketches over the years. Reich is funny, he knows what’s funny, and he cares about putting more funny out into the world. He’s invested in the output of the company as its own entity, separate from its ability to bring in revenue.
In an interview conducted by Forbes in 2016, Reich said of the streaming wars “I think the winners are those who are going to be able to stay in the game the longest, and are going to be the most reactive to their audience, who is telling them how to adapt.” It might be that staying in the game can be less about the money, and more about the drive.
