How A Couple Of Freshmen Built CollegeHumor Into A Profitable Cultural Phenomenon – with Josh Abramson
When he was a college freshman, Josh Abramson and his buddy heard about a humor web site that was making $20,000 in ad revenue. So they got a copy of FrontPage, Microsfot’s simple web site maker, and launched CollegeHumor, a site dedicated to the goofy things that college kids find funny.
In this interview, you’ll hear the story of how he promoted the site, generated revenue from it, and eventually sold 51% of it for a reported $20 million. You’ll hear how, when the ad market died, he created a tshirt company called BustedTees, so he could raise revenue by selling his own products. You’ll hear about the side businesses that flopped (like the dating site) and the ones that worked out (like Vimeo).
Josh Abramson is the president of Connected Ventures, LLC, the parent company of CollegeHumor.com, Vimeo and Busted Tees, among other online entities. Josh founded CollegeHumor.com in 1999 with childhood friend Ricky Van Veen. Both were college freshmen at the time. The site, which began as a place to collect jokes, links and photographs that college students were e-mailing back and forth, grew so rapidly that Josh and Ricky were approached in their sophomore year with a buyout offer of $9 million. They turned the offer down, eventually selling a controlling interest in Connected Ventures to InterActiveCorp in 2006 for a reported $20 million.
Andrew: Alright, two things before we get started. First, I recently got an email from James Lindstorm, Lindstrom. I can never pronounce anyone’s names right. James wanted to know if I had a few minutes for a phone call with him and that gave me an idea for something I can do with my new grasshopper.com phone number. So, Grasshopper gave me a phone number with extensions and all kinds of different cool features like no matter where I am in the world I can get calls. So here’s what I’m gonna do with it. I’m gonna open it up to you. If you wanna have a conversation with me about your business, about just about, actually not just about anything. I’m gonna limit it to business. If you wanna have a conversation about something that’s going on in your business. How to find a mentors. How to, if you’re struggling with something. If there’s anything I can help with, leave a comment and I will email you back and we’ll set up a time...
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