Sam Reich on CollegeHumor’s Evolution From Meme Factory To Full-Fledged Digital Studio

TV execs and analysts frequently discuss what’s happening in the industry today by saying HBO (a premium cable network) is trying to become Netflix before Netflix (a premium streaming service) becomes HBO. Cable networks are expanding their reach to iPhones, Roku boxes and other devices, while streaming services are expanding their original programming and catalogs of films and TV seasons.

Although less obvious and less heralded, there is a similar phenomenon under way among the companies who make the content. Digital studios that started out making web shows and YouTube clips are now making programming for cable networks and streaming services, while the production companies who have long made TV shows are focusing more attention than ever on internet content.

“Cable networks are producing for digital and digital studios like us are producing for cable,” said Sam Reich, the head of video for CollegeHumor and president of Big Breakfast, CollegeHumor‘s production company that is making shows for cable networks (MTV, truTV) and streaming services (YouTube Red, Go90). “What we’re seeing right now is a terrific fragmentation of the audience that I think it will be a great equalizer.”

To get a sense of what’s happening right now on the production side of the business, we sat down for a conversation with Reich about why and how CollegeHumor is expanding its production to cable and streaming.

DECIDER: Did you start the video operation at CollegeHumor?

I did. They had made four videos before I arrived, but they really didn’t have an operation yet. I was 21 when I started, and that was 10 years ago.

What was the job when you started?

At the time, content websites focusing on video popping up everywhere. HBO had This Just In, NBC had Dotcomedy, and there were several others. CollegeHumor wanted to invest in video in their typical grassroots way, which was to find somebody young and ambitious and do it all in-house. At the time, we were just about the only in-house video operation. Super Deluxe, for example, was purchasing web series from established comics and production companies. We were just a group of scrappy young comics and filmmakers.

Is CollegeHumor independent?

It’s part of IAC, which owns Vimeo, Match.com, OK Cupid and Tinder.

Is CollegeHumor’s revenue mostly from hosted video?

If you had asked me that two years, the answer would have been that media deals and branded content represented just about 100 percent of our revenue stream. Now that we’ve broken into TV and other production projects, it’s closer to 50/50.

When you say media deals and branded content, what are you talking about?

It’s a combination of things. A brand or a media company will come to us and say they want to engage this campaign with us, and we’ll give them some combination of media — banner advertisement on CollegeHumor.com and branded content like a video that’s not quite a commercial but promotes their product in some way.

Do you put CollegeHumor in a category with content companies like Rooster Teeth, Funny or Die, RocketJump, Nerdist?

I think that’s exactly right. We’re similar to Funny or Die in the sense that we have our own site that many visitors come to on a monthly basis. The other piece of our business is YouTube. We’re one of the top 50 YouTube channels.

Where are most of your viewers by platform?

There are people who visit on CollegeHumor.com, there’s people who visit the YouTube channel, and there’s our social media platforms — most relevantly Facebook, where our video impressions have grown a lot in the last year. YouTube is still number one for us.

You have a digital-studio component. How does that work?

We decided a couple of years ago that we wanted to take our video-making capacity to Los Angeles and see what projects we could set up. CollegeHumor is a very relevant piece of that. Our biggest project to date — Adam Ruins Everything on truTV — began as a CollegeHumor web series.

The name “CollegeHumor” is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it’s a really well-known brand name, and there’s always new audience every year coming into CollegeHumor. The audience expands every year because the people who have been viewing it since the very beginning are still watching us 10 years later. The curse is the industry mistaking us for a bunch of college kids running around with cameras. Our production ability is a lot more sophisticated than that.

Are you committed to the brand name long term? Is that something you’ve all have talked about?

Oh yeah, CollegeHumor and this production company — Big Breakfast — are inextricably bound together.

Adam Ruins Everything started as a video series. How did you go from that to truTV?

We had just moved moved to Los Angeles when a writer/performer in the CollegeHumor room, Adam Conover, pitched this idea for a higher-production-value take on an infotainment video. We made it and people really responded to it. We did two more episodes, and each one did incredibly well. We fleshed out the concept and took it around town, and truTV took a chance on it. We did a pilot with them, it tested well, and they ordered twelve episodes from us. Those episodes aired and the ratings climbed from week to week, which is rare in TV nowadays. TruTV just ordered another 14 episodes.

I have only seen the YouTube version. Is the cable series a collection of segments like those?

It’s kind of like This American Life. We pick a theme and then tell three or four stories on that theme.

The episode about funerals is the John Oliver style of humor-driven journalism. That’s the idea?

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is an incredible show, but we’re doing something a little bit different. In our security episode, we tackled the TSA, which is something John Oliver might tackle. We took it out of behind the desk and do something ambitious from a production perspective.

How are you licensing that with truTV? Are you running the segments as individual clips on your platforms?

What’s great about truTV as a partner is that they were really interested in leveraging the CollegeHumor platform to build the show’s audience, and they recognized the potential power of that. We devised a strategy together to break out a couple clips after the show airs that we thought had the potential to be big online, and we would post one to our YouTube channel and they would post the other to their YouTube channel. Sharing the digital content has really worked. Those videos all have over a million views.

A traditional production company can’t leverage because it doesn’t have its own platform.

That’s exactly right. I think that’s something big we’re bringing to the table. The YouTube audience is massive — we have 10.6 million subscribers — so so getting something out there in front of that audience is very meaningful.

How big is your total audience?

Across all platforms, we’re getting about 15 million uniques per month.

Tell me about the show you’re making for YouTube Red.

Bad Internet will be an anthology series about the internet and internet culture that’s sort of like a funny version of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone. Each episode is about 10 minutes, and there will be 10 episodes in all. There are some fun cameos from the comedy community. There’s one episode called “The Year-Long Ad” in which a couple is watching Hulu and has the choice of watching an ad every few minutes or only ads for a full year and never again for the rest of their lives. They enter into this virtual-reality, year-long ad experience from which there is no escape. Our writers love science fiction, so it was a great opportunity for us to work in that genre.

You made a series of sketches called “If Google Was A Guy” where Brian Huskey plays Google. How did that start out?

That was based on a pitch from former CollegeHumor writer Streeter Seidell who wrote the first three of those shorts before he became a writer at Saturday Night Live. We had known Brian Huskey for a while, and he’s great at getting the different aspects of what it means to be Google.

The first two episodes of that combined for about 50 million page views. Is that big for a comedy series?

Yeah, that’s pretty big. It’s hard to compare viewership from one series to another. If you take something like Jake and Amir, which was one of CollegeHumor’s longest-running web series, viewership on that was much lower — about half a million views per episode — but it was consistent every week for years. Another series that compares to “If Google Was A Guy” is the Batman parody series that we did with Pete Holmes.

Are you mostly generating your own ideas and producing them yourselves, or are you taking a lot of outside writer pitches more like a traditional production company?

We’re doing both. For the YouTube channel, we have our in-house stable of writer/performers and we meet on a weekly basis. People pitch out sketch ideas, they collaborate throughout the week, we bring them back to a read-through on Thursday, and then we put some of those into production. That part is more like a show. On the longform side we’re generating material in-house like “Middle of the Night Show” last year, which starred Brian Murphy, and we’re doing some projects with people outside the company.

I saw the Thomas Middleditch episode of MTV’s “Middle of the Night Show.” Was that the pilot?

Right.

That’s a pretty bananas concept. You wake somebody up in the middle of the night and start making a show. Did he know what was happening?

[Laughs.] That’s a really good question. We would tell people there’s going to be a talk show tomorrow and put them in a hotel room in New York, and that’s basically all we told them. I’ve known Thomas for years and he was very game, but we caught him a little off guard. He’s a huge Game of Thrones fan, so he was really surprised to find Hodor [Kristian Nairn] in his bed.

That’s another example of a CollegeHumor video turned television show. Dan Gurewitch, who was formerly at CollegeHumor and is now a writer on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, came up with that. The idea was that we would wake Dan up in the middle of the night to host a talk show, which we did twice. That was in 2011, and then several years later Evan Bregman at Electus said he thought it should be a TV show; we didn’t even pitch it around to different networks because MTV was so excited about it.

And you have a show on Go90?

Yes. It’s called Fatal Decision. It’s a scripted show based on the concept of someone making an action series using only office supplies and trying not to get fired while doing it. It’s essentially a show within a show.

Are you developing for other platforms?

We’re talking to digital and TV partners. Most ideas fall into one category or the other, so it’s rare that you have an idea that we think would work for both.

How do you think about these projects in terms of reinforcing CollegeHumor’s brand identity? A traditional production company makes shows for different networks, but CollegeHumor comes from a making things for your website or YouTube channel.

I think the short version of the answer is that the reason why we carved out Big Breakfast as it’s own identity so that we can do things that aren’t necessarily in line with the CollegeHumor brand. Sometimes we do things that are very associated with the CollegeHumor brand. The YouTube Red series is a great example of that. It’s meant to leverage our YouTube audience and connects to CollegeHumor is all sorts of ways. On the flipside of that, we did a show for DirecTV called The Britishes that’s a sketch comedy set in the world of Downton Abbey. DirecTV wanted something for their demographic, and we were able to do that.

Are you working on an OTT app?

That’s a consideration. We’re not quite ready to jump into that pond yet, but we’re thinking about it.

Have you looked much into how small you could scale a paid streaming network — whether it takes 100,000 or 500,000 or a million subscribers? Would CollegeHumor scale to a $4-a-month streaming service?

I don’t think those numbers are clear right now. We’re in the middle of an SVOD boom with channels popping up everywhere, and we’re yet to see winner and losers. I don’t think we know yet what it takes to pull that off.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.