I'm no sure why this was a 'secret' to Alley insider or to anyone that bother to look at the sites that Connected Ventures/IAC (Collegehumor, Busted Tees and Vimeo parent company) has. Obviously Busted Tees is the one who makes them more money besides the advertising of CollegeHumor and other minimal sources of revenue.
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"Last week, Josh Abramson told us that he and Ricky "might start a few new sites [and/or] we might be making a few small acquisitons," but wouldn't elaborate."
They already have a new one -- http://todaysbigthing.com -- and it's actually good, one of those single purpose sites.
they and how many other people have gotten rich off the phenomenon of t-shirts gaining social acceptance in more and more settings? i mean, how many of us wear tshirts to work at least once a week? or going out to the bar/club? and how many of us would have been able to do that in either setting even 20 years ago?
tshirts: no longer the other underwear.
The main issue being that it costs you a ton of money to produce inventory you probably won't be able to move. The economics only make sense only when the entire nation is buying your t-shirts. It's all loss-leading to get to that point, though.
Actually the bonus with t-shirts is that it doesn't cost a ton of money. I used to work with a company that made most of its money off of t-shirts.
Getting 144 t-shirts printed with one color costs about 500 dollars, including the shirts. You can sell these for $20, which means you make about $2300. You don't really need to make more than 144 (unless you are at the level of CollegeHumor) because there are so many just-in-time style print shops. If you sell out, you can have another run made in less than a week.
Their real (not so secret) secret to success is flagrant copyright violation on almost everything they post (which is why they eventually went to a more "user posted" model--to be protected by the safe-harbor clauses of the DMCA). The same can be said of YouTube: there is tons of copyrighted stuff, a few short "America's Funniest Home Videos" style stuff, and then there is some excellent user-produced made-to-entertain content. But in regards to the latter, 90% of the time it is backed up by copyrighted music.
Yes, I totally agree. All of those t-shirts are flagrant copyright violations. ;-)
But more to your point: even if the copyright problems were as widespread as you claim, it simply demonstrates a gap in the market that exists. There is obviously a demand for this copyrighted content online, and it's not because people are suddenly getting it free (since it was essentially free before). Luckily, there is a new demand for user-generated content as well. Now that there is a more equal playing field between traditional and user-generated media, it will be very interesting to see if the demand for traditional media keeps up. My guess is that it will become too expensive to compete, since people only place a certain premium on quality.
In terms of CollegeHumor, they have a lot of original content and have maintained a very good grip on what college kids like and think is funny. It is a mis-characterization to attribute all of their success to simply stealing other people's work. Nobody gets a free ride like that.
