Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/09/collegehumor-laid-off-almost-e.html
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Accountability just doesn’t seem to matter anymore
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Is that what happened to Cracked a couple years ago? They seemed to go through a similar boom-bust cycle.
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It happened to a lot of sites. Facebook tricked a lot of media companies into “pivoting to video” and wrecking their businesses in the process…
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Yes it was - but what i don’t understand is why College Humor can fall victim to it now, such a long time after this FB scheme was made public. The timing on that doesn’t seem to make sense
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I’m guessing they tried to keep things going and fix the mistake, but eventually it all caught up to them and things fell apart now.
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Cracked is a weird case. It looks like they hired back Seanbaby (or at least commissioned a few articles) to recapture the glory days. On the other hand, it looks like somebody decided to run the entire site through a bowdlerization filter and not double-check the results, causing a host of Scunthorpe problems (e.g. “H*** sapiens”). I can’t tell if they’re trying to revive the site or just squeeze out a few more clicks while they can.
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Shouldn’t these companies have been able to verify the payout of video content before hiring hundreds of people? FB deserves the blame, but I don’t understand how seemingly everyone put so much money behind the lie without posting a few test videos and waiting to see the payout.
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CH tried to find a solution, a year or so ago they launched a subscription-based service called Dropout with new shows, bringing back old members, etc. I suppose it didn’t work out. Too bad, really. I can’t say I was a huge fan of most of their newer stuff, but there were still sketches and series worth watching.
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I’m not “liking” this post because I like it, but because I can’t poke holes in this baldfaced statement and I’m a staunch supporter of the truth. I wish there was a little “is truth” icon I could click.
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You’d think that, but from working with Facebook on a different sort of failed partnership program, the way they deal with that is by sandbagging you with a bajillion knobs to turn, so as long as you assume they aren’t lying about the number of impressions/conversions the platform is capable of delivering, it feels a bit like its your own fault for not knowing how the knobs should be set to open the floodgates. You can waste many months and a small fortune before your management realizes they’re never going to see the returns they were led to expect.
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As Dave said, using Facebook wasn’t the mistake. Centralizing everything around Facebook and its services was. Facebook lied like a used-car salesman looking for cheap cash to get out of town.
Same with this push to store everything remotely or cloud-based. The cloud is just someone else’s computer. What happens when they walk away?
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In other news… CollegeHumor still exists 
One of the worst ones I’ve ever seen was “sop****re”. I didn’t see that word there before, but now I can’t unsee it. Thanks, Scunthorpe Problem, for having the exact opposite effect of what some programmer intended you to have!
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This is good advice but I think it’s one that is a lot easier to follow if you’re an indie one-person outfit, than if you’re a 100+ company. As an individual I can diversify the services I use because I don’t pay much for them (or at all). A larger company pushing out tons more content, generating tons more traffic, and requiring a lot more complex infrastructure, absolutely wouldn’t be able to do that.
I’m sorry for those companies who believed FB that their advertising works. I use FB only as a way to connect with friends; my home business has no desire to give FB a dime.
Adam Conover: A once-thriving online comedy industry was decimated.
Me: Actually … decimated means killing one tenth and keeping the rest. What happened here is the layoff of nine tenths. Would that be novem-decimated?
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You’d be all set to be a contestant on the CollegeHumour game show “Well, Actually…”, if it still existed.
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This really sucks, I watch a lot of CH stuff on YouTube like the Drawfee stuff and D20. I hope those guys find something to continue making good content.
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Running a business is always a crap shoot.
I remember around 9/11, the barber shop I used to go to, through no fault of their own, had to close because, for security reasons, the Army shut down the nearby gate to Ft. Myers in Arlington, and they lost 90% of their customers.
I remember when Google changed their metrics for ranking bloggers, and overnight, Metafilter lost 95% of their Google Ad revenue. (Luckily, Matt Haughey had enough pull with the techs at Google and managed to get them to exempt his site or something, and he got a lot of the revenue back).
It’s just the way it is. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Congo, and your business goes belly up.
