College Humor

Collegehumor.com is a humor web site that targets college males. Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, and Josh Abramson founded the web site while they attended various colleges. Abramson says, "We wanted to start an advertisement-based business because at the time the advertising market was pretty hot and we'd seen other people develop web sites that were popular making a lot of money". Abramson and Van Veen were best friends from middle school in the Baltimore area and in 1999 they launched CH at Wake Forest. Abramson went to the University of Richmond and later they added Lodwick who attended Rochester Institute of Technology. As the site grew Van Veen recruited Zach Klein, a friend from Wake Forest, to help them run the site. In the beginning the site was a place to collect all the funny emails, pictures, and links that college kids love to send around. This idea took off and the founders decided they might be able to make a full-time career out of it. The foursome stayed in San Diego while Klein finished college then made the move to New York City. They started in a 4,200 sq. ft., five bedroom, renovated flat in the Tribeca district. They all lived together and the 5th bedroom served as their "offices". Van Veen served as the editor in chief, Abramson handled the business end of things, Lodwick dealt with the technical side and Klein worked on the overall design. The key to their web site was the user-generated content. Fans from all over the country send in media constantly and they post a big portion of it on their site and then people pick what they "like" most and vote for it. Much of the work is done for the founders. They simply collect the media in a single easily navigatable location. 

Sometime in 2003 the site exploded and began averaging at least a million unique visitors a month. They also launched BustedTees.com a humor t-shirt web site that ties into the content on CH. By 2005 the site was averaging millions of unique visitors a month. They employed 17 people and had offices located in New York. Companies like Ford and Universal were advertising on their site. They made $6 million in advertising revenue in 2005. They set up a parent company called Connected Ventures which included CH, Vimeo, Defunker, and BustedTees. They published several books and reportedly had a movie development deal with Universal, although nothing has come to fruition yet. 

Today, CH continues to grow and expand. Ricky Van Veen lives in a renovated apartment several floors above the CH offices which take up an entire floor of a building in the Tribeca district. The founders sold a controlling stake in Connected Ventures to InterActiveCorp, but the company was making $5-10 million a year before they sold it. The site now averages 7 million unique visitors per month. They have added the CHTV aka College Humor TV or CollegeHumor Originals. These are short videos that include parodies, music videos, college sketches, etc. that mimic the type of content CH's fans enjoy. Van Veen is still the chief editor and the creative director and works with a number of employees turned actors to produce a variety of videos including the Hardly Working and Jake and Amir series. CH also finished its first season of the College Humor Show which aired on MTV and included six episodes.