Pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to commend the gents at IAC’s (IACI) video factory for:

1. Trying to broaden their demo to include theater people, as well as parents of theater people and parents of College Humor fans. And…
2. Using some SEO savvy. Name-checking Twitter, Facebook, Evite, eHarmony, Pandora and other Web favorites should help make up some ground this will lose on Digg. Where I assume most users will be bemused, at best.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090629/sharks-jets-page-views-web-site-story/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090522/college-humor-dudes-newest-product-an-amazoncom-prank/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090522/college-humor-dudes-newest-product-an-amazoncom-prank/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 14:27:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7637 The smarter-than-they-look guys at CollegeHumor.com attract some seven million unique visitors a month, are making smart strides in Web video and have their own show on MTV. And when they’re not doing that, they monkey with Amazon.

That’s why this fine Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, available for as little as $9.78, became one of the online retailer’s most popular items in the last week. Prompted by a link at the IAC (IACI)-owned site, CollegeHumor readers bought up scads of the shirts, and filled Amazon (AMZN) with glowing reviews like these:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather…

This is the only t-shirt Chuck Norris wears. Wolves howl at the moon, and the moon howls at Chuck…

…So I’m looking for threads that say, “Hey baby…I’m real boss!” when I stumble upon this epic creation. The wolves spoke to me in a language all their own; it was like German, Mongol, and Bitchin all mixed together. I mean, one wolf howlin at the moon is major…but three???

Why bother? If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to get the joke. More info via the Washington Post, including the most pertinent detail: As clever as the CollegeHumor dudes are, they neglected to actually figure out how to profit from the stunt themselves.

And a good reminder that even though Google’s (GOOG) YouTube generates more than five billion streams a month and Hulu has grown 490 percent in the last year, no one has really figured out a good way to turn all those eyeballs into dollars. Yet.

A short cheat sheet: The guys on the left side of the table are College Humor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, who sold their company to IAC (IACI) in 2006, yet remain employed by Barry Diller. They’re also pretty sharp business guys, it turns out. The guys on the right side are Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, College Humor employees who have had a long-running series of clips on the site. Dina Kaplan, who gets name-checked several times, is COO of New York-based video site Blip.tv, which happens to be the distributor of this clip.

When I first met Avner Ronen in January, the Boxee CEO was beaming. His Web video company was one of the breakout hits at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But when I had lunch with Ronen yesterday, he was much more subdued. Going head-to-head against the TV establishment can take the wind out of you.

In the span of two months, Boxee has gone from obscure start-up to an irritant or worse for the TV business.

That’s because Boxee, which makes it easy to sort and play video you grab from the Web, symbolizes a real threat for the established players: That one day, many consumers will consume most of their TV via video they find on the Web. And then they’ll cut TV networks and cable operators out of the picture.

That’s a long way from happening, but just the notion of it seemed to be enough for GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, which apparently forced their Hulu joint venture to stop working with Boxee last month.

Now Hulu and Boxee are in a cat-and-mouse game, whereby Boxee’s engineers try to find ways to get Hulu’s stuff onto their browsers and the Hulu guys try to stop them. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Ronen isn’t optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon. He also says the past few months have taught him how little he knew about the media business prior to starting Boxee in 2007. Had he known how entrenched and complicated the relationships between broadcasters, programmers, cable networks and cable operators are, he says, he might never have tried to get the company going.

But Ronen still figures he’ll thrive in the long run. He notes that some big media companies that aren’t NBC and Fox–Netflix (NFLX) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, for instance–have been happy to work with Boxee, or at least not to complain about the service.

I’ll let him explain why, and lay out Boxee’s future plans (which included a beta launch this summer and Boxee-enabled devices next year) in this video interview.

And if, like me, you’re going to be in Austin for South By Southwest on Saturday, you can ask him yourself, at a panel discussion where he’ll share the stage with College Humor’s Ricky Van Veen and B.J. Novak of “The Office.”

Also, did I mention that Ricky Van Veen and Josh Abramson are still in their 20s? They are. But the College Humor co-founders are remarkably level-headed given their well-chronicled success so far.

That’s likely how they’ve survived multiple management shake-ups at Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI). And it seems to be why they can handle their day jobs while simultaneously producing a new TV show–which is shooting in their office.

The show is scheduled to start airing on MTV in February; Viacom’s (VIA) cable network has bought six episodes, but the boys are hopeful this will turn into a longer engagement. They gave me a brief tour of the office/set and talked to me about the show and the business in general yesterday. The upshot: Making content is hard. Also, you need to dress up if you’re going to the IAC Christmas party.

Note to demanding video viewers: Per your request, I’m trying to shorten these things up, but this is still a whopping six minutes long. So if you want to jump around: The dude in the cage is around the 1:30 mark, and the taco truck appears about two minutes in. Ricky says something off-color around 2:50, and Josh appears shortly after that.

Here’s a College Humor best-of video announcing the MTV show:

But here’s a clip that’s much more representative of what the site’s up to:

Here’s HBO’s clever attempt: Use an existing video that’s already popular on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and try to piggyback off of that.

Time Warner’s (TWX) pay cable channel’s “Flight Of The Conchords,” its comedy series about two Kiwi slacker/musicians trying to make it in New York, is already a YouTube sensation. So no need to reinvent the wheel: To promote the new season of the show, the channel is asking the site’s users to lip-synch their own versions of one of the show’s most popular clips.

The carrot: The best versions, collected here, will get mashed into a best-of compilation clip that will air after one of the new shows next year. To get things moving, Deep Focus, the interactive ad agency running the campaign for HBO, bought ads on a handful of video Web sites that specialize in comedy clips. And those sites in turn created their own versions, using sort-of-well-known folks like Andy Dick and College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld.

The promotion just kicked off last week, so it’s too early to tell whether any of the new clips will take off–and more important, bring HBO more viewers and/or subscribers. But at least give the channel credit for trying to harness the audience that YouTube and others have aggregated.

Here’s the original version:

And here are some pre-seeded takes…
College Humor (note the MTV crew in the background):

Funny Or Die:

My Damn Channel:

The New York Post’s Keith Kelly has already reported that layoffs are in motion at People, Time and Sports Illustrated over the next few days; I am told that cuts are also coming to Fortune magazine today or tomorrow. Here’s a Sports Illustrated employee’s take on the situation there:

We are all expecting the hatchet Thursday or Friday. Morale is dismal. One colleague of mine, uber golf writer John Garrity, told several of us that he’s taking the package but will continue on for a while as a special contributor. We expect two or three photo editors to go, and two or three members of the Sport’s Illustrated Latino staff (the Spanish language SI publication, which posted a net profit of approx. one million in ’07 and broke even in ’08, was inexplicably shuttered). Also photographers are rumored to be being cut to half time service and members of our copy desk have been asked to take up to a 30% pay reduction for which they will work fewer hours. Charlie Leerhsen, one of our two executive editors, told a few staff members that he was going to be leaving.”

In other layoff/shutdown news:

• I am told that Forbes (where I worked for many years), is in the final stages of planning cuts as it prepares to merge the editorial operations of its magazine and Web site units. Last month the company began integrating its business groups and laid off about three dozen people in the process.
• GE’s (GE) NBC Universal has laid off at least 30 people in its sales group, reports AdAge. The cuts are part of a previously reported mandate from NBC CEO Jeff Zucker to cut three percent of the company’s budget. The Post says another 80 people could be fired at CNBC.
• Barry Diller’s IAC (IACI) is breaking up its programming group, which includes ventures like College Humor, 236.com and Tina Brown’s DailyBeast.com. Some but not all of the sites will be closed down or sold off. PaidContent has details.

As always, I value reader input: You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. If you want to be completely anonymous, you can use the blind tip box here.