Digitivity and College Humor
Ricky van Veen: Beer Money to Board Meetings - how to monetise a niche site - CollegeHumor.com
- site first iteration in Jan 2000. in traditional media terms about as old as CBS. started as a collection of photos, videos and articles from friend. Caught on by IM etc, and by end of year was the place to go for humor and to contribute things
- they get asked a lot about how they have lasted that long and stayed relevant. The base content is UGC - so it stays relevant to the audience as they submit the stuff they want to watch. We are close in age to the demographic - average age is 24; editorial staff skews younger with the interns. Look at Facebook - built by a bunch of people who used the web before they had sex (quote from Fred Wilson). The editorial voice differentiates them - they are not a bland site, they have their own personalities. On the web, personality matters; people want to go to a site where they are comfortable and familiar. He encourages staff to make videos and put them on the site.
- Where is it heading? Original content is the answer. we have an in-house team to do stuff. We are not getting rid of UGC just building on it. We have the highest rate of return for original content on the web. We have a hit strategy - we do not make stuff to fill airtime; we aim for 9/10s for content; if something is a hit then we make more of it; we’ve had 7 years of video experience and have a good idea of what a hit is. 2-3 minutes, hook early, topical. (Boston Terrorists) Another sweet spot is ‘candy corn’ - cultural touchstones, inside jokes that everyone gets. (Hollywood, videogames and Minesweeper).
- How do we monetise our audience? At first, we knew no media buyers - so we created BustedTess.com, funny slogans on tshirts. later, they met a few adults/media buyers and started to sell advertise. Everything we do on advertising is pro customer. We are open about who gives what freebies, we are non-intrusive, we think about the impact. Things like custom skins etc. We try and avoid being disruptive - wrap the video page in an ad. People OK with this - will watch and have high click through. Biggest area is editorial integration - we do a lot of this. Editorial integration used to be the added value to the media buy, now it is the other way round - buyers want to hear integration first.
- So where are we heading? Its not all going to the web - as creatives on the web do still want to get to tv and film. So keep asking when will this change? It will depend on the migration of ad budgets and the following migration of talent. talent will not get paid as much online at the moment, but when ad money moves across, the big talent will do. Big stars will get big traffic - see Will Farrell. then the web will be able to create stars AND maintain them. Star power and brand is not an automatic win, but will make a site stick out of the crowd. At CH we are doing offline stuff that we can then leverage on the web. One obstacle is that Hollywood still does not grasp that people use the web all day, everyday. They think it’s big, but it’s bigger than they think.
Q: you talked about videos for advertisers - do you make the video? A: Yes we do. we script and get approval, we make a microsite and put the video in the main page. The best branding is just a 1sec title card with surrounding page chrome.
Tags: collegehumor, ugc, video
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POSTED IN: Engaging the Customer, Entertainment Marketing, User Generated Content, Video Content
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