CollegeHumor:
Ca$hing In On Comedy
WELCOME!! My name is Allison Borko and this is my Anthropology of Media page! For those of you who don’t know, I’m a freshman at Johns Hopkins University and this website is my final project for Anthropology of Media. In Anthropology of Media, our class looked at different forms of medium throughout time, including newspapers, radios, photography, cinema, Internet and more. We studied the influence these forms of media have had on their era and vice versa. For our final project, we were assigned to choose a media artifact to analyze and explore. I decided to study my favorite website CollegeHumor (Check it out! You’ll spend hours entertained, I promise). Specifically, I studied CollegeHumor’s media advertising campaign and how it is overall representative of the new generation of online marketing. To learn more, please look around my site! Enjoy!
Throughout the semester, my project has evolved and improved. I have long been a fan of CollegeHumor and spend plenty of time on their website. As a result of having such a strong connection to CollegeHumor and experiencing it firsthand, my project has been especially interesting to me. Over time, I’ve become more interested and immersed in my studies. My project has become much more focused and concise, especially because I was very vague on what I wanted to study when I first started. Although it has changed, here it my original proposal:
I would like to study CollegeHumor and their media advertising. CollegeHumor is a comedy website that profits from online advertising. They have ads incorporated throughout their website, including in the actual videos, commercials between the videos and as the background of their site. I will look at the different types of advertisements as well as the relationship between the site content and ad content. I want to study this because, not only do I spend a lot of time on CollegeHumor and see their ads, but the business side of the website seems very underrated.
Some people might think that the website is poorly run, but it is actually a major corporation. CollegeHumor and its sister sites are run by Connected Ventures, a new media network and development company. CollegeHumor Media, which includes the actual CollegeHumor website and a few others, is a division of Electus and operating business of IAC. IAC is a leading Internet company with over than 50 fast-growing, highly related brands including Match.com and Ask.com. Furthermore, Electus, a part of IAC, is a studio that advertises all over the world through various mediums.
Clearly, although CollegeHumor started as a joke between friends, it is now a legitimate business. As of May 2009, CollegeHumor generates 80.6 million monthly page views and these page views convert into enormous profits when advertising revenue is considered. Since I really like the website, I think this will be interesting to explore how successful their ad campaign is. Furthermore, I think there will be enough research for my project. If I focused on just CollegeHumor there probably wouldn’t be, by I want to look at the different levels of advertising through IAC, Electus, Connected Ventures and finally CollegeHumor. Additional to research on the empirical data, I could talk to viewers and get their take on the validity and success of the online advertising. Most importantly, I plan to use an ethnographic approach to learn about CollegeHumor’s ad campaign. I will visit the website and observe their ads. Hopefully, I can make objective observations about the form, style, appeal, quality, positioning, and effectiveness (among other qualities) of the ads. Between these different corporations and methods, there should be enough research for an interesting and informative project on CollegeHumor’s ad campaign.
Now that you have been introduced to my anthropological studies, here is some background on the CollegeHumor website as explained in my original introduction:
CollegeHumor is the number one comedy site online featuring funny pictures, original videos, articles, user submitted content and more. The website, as implied by its name, targets a core audience of young adults, manly male, ages 18-34. CollegeHumor reaches an enormous amount of viewers. Their original videos, written, directed and acted in by the CollegeHumor staff, get up to 80 million monthly views while the site itself gets 10 million monthly views. CollegeHumor is ranked as one of the top five websites for college males, competing with major corporations including Facebook, ESPN, YouTube, and Google. Additionally, CollegeHumor is one of the top 10 comedy podcasts on iTunes, the 13th most subscribed channel on YouTube and the 3rd most viewed comedy channel on YouTube.
CollegeHumor started in 1999 when two college students, Ricky Van Veen and Josh Abramson, decided they needed a website to share the funny pictures and videos they found. From there, the brand expanded. Rather than having to rely “solely on user-generated materials,” they had an “ingenious plan to begin producing their own content for CollegeHumor” (Orr). Once CollegeHumor staff members started producing videos, writing articles and creating sketches, in addition to the other user submitted content, their popularity skyrocketed. CollegeHumor has become a brand name that all college, and even high school students, should know. Most famous for their “Jake and Amir” sketches as well as “The Prank War”, CollegeHumor has created viral sensations that dominate the Internet. From there, CollegeHumor extended offline with three books, live comedy tours and even a television program. “The CollegeHumor Show” ran for one season on MTV as a scripted reality show where the CollegeHumor staff members played exaggerated versions of themselves. However, despite their branching out, CollegeHumor’s claim to fame still seems to be online.
CollegeHumor is a subset of CH Media, an online entertainment company that is composed of entertainment websites including CollegeHumor, Today’s Big Thing, Dorkly and Sports Pickle. The CH Media sites collectively receive 15 million monthly views. Furthermore, CollegeHumor and its sister sites are run by Connected Ventures, a new media network and development company. CH Media specifically is a division of Electus, a studio that advertises all over the world through various mediums. Electus is an operating business of InterActiveCorp, the leading Internet Company in the world. IAC bought 51% ownership of CollegeHumor is 2006 for an estimated $20 million. IAC now runs the business aspect of CollegeHumor by generating ad revenue. I plan to study CollegeHumor’s marketing and advertising techniques.
Some of the general questions I’m hoping to pursue are:
Who are CollegeHumor’s sponsors? How does CollegeHumor pick its advertisers? What’s their demographic? How do they try to reach their target demographic? Are they successful? How much revenue do they earn? Is advertising their only source of revenue? What are the different types of ads? How do you plan on expanding your business?
On a more anthropological level: How do you measure the success of an ad? What types of ads are most influential to the viewer? Is online advertising the most successful method? How do marketers create ads to reflect the site’s content? How do market’s engage their target consumer? Has online media surpassed the influence of other mediums, such as the newspaper or radio? How do the new methods of online advertising reflect the zeitgeist of our culture/generation?