My TV watching habits have changed pretty dramatically with the times. I still love shows like NBC’s Hannibal—dark, aesthetic, dramatic. But more often than not, I find myself reaching for something a bit more lighthearted and fun. I’m nerdy. I’m a millennial. In short, I’m the target audience of dropout.tv.
Depending on your interests, you might have been exposed to Dropout from one of the short social media clips that make their way around various services. Or you might have been exposed to it through Dimension20, if you’re the sort of person who plays or is into Dungeons and Dragons. Either way, this is the sort of niche streaming service that provides me with lighthearted bits of skilled comedians and improvisers doing their thing. It’s been one of the subscriptions that I don’t regret in the slightest.
Ownership and advertising revenue
You might, if you’re the sort of person who’s been into internet comedy long enough, recognize a number of the comedians from CollegeHumor. Dropout has had an interesting history as a business — being given the freedom to pursue it’s own direction after acquisition by private equity. And it’s current trajectory makes it compelling as an alternative to other streaming services. Here’s an insightful conversation with Sam Reich, the current CEO of Dropout on the history and trajectory of Dropout:
Dropout was a priority that came out of IAC, which was our corporate parent at the time.
This was who owned CollegeHumor?
This is who owned CollegeHumor, and for years and years, IAC was trying to figure out how we would make not just a lot of money, but a lot, a lot of money. And there was always kind of a… A cynic might call it a get-rich-quick scheme at the time. It was ad sales, and then social media took a big chomp out of ad sales, and then it was television. It turned out television production didn’t scale very effectively. And then finally, the idea was, let’s try going direct-to-audience.
Just to go over-the-top, as they say. I’m not sure exactly what the top we’re going over is, but we’re going over the top of something. I guess the whole system.
That phrase makes it feel like we’re gambling the house, and in a way, we were. There was a collection of executives who were very bullish about this within CollegeHumor. I wasn’t necessarily one of them. I slowly but surely warmed up to it, imagining that if it didn’t work, at least we’d get to create our own cool stuff for a while. The notion was to go direct-to-audience. There won’t be the gatekeepers that there are in Hollywood. We won’t have to start over every year like we do in ad sales. That is, by the way, one of the intrinsic benefits of subscription: you’re not starting your business over every year, versus ad sales, where you have to go out and sell every year.
Rewilding the Internet
The conversation covers the history, the business model, the platform they use for streaming and some interesting speculation about what they’re doing right. One thing that particularly struck me was the reference to Homestar Runner, later on in the interview:
Interesting. Is there, on the list of reasons that you like this or want to do this, we talked about this before, but let’s end here with this. Is [the idea] that people aren’t doing things weird enough, and you want to do things weird, on that list?
One hundred percent. You and I have connected a lot on the topic of Homestar Runner over the years. Homestar Runner may be hugely responsible for my career taking the direction it has. It was incredibly influential on me. And something I loved about it was like, it felt like a walled garden of weird that existed at a URL.
Yeah. That resonates.
And I think about how sometimes I wish that I could plant a forest full of weird trees on the internet. I wish that the internet were still a place where, just like there was really fun, mysterious, hopeful stuff that existed a URL away. I would hope that Dropout can just be one of those things.
That shared sense of weird is also part of why I’m very into what they’re doing with Dropout. But more importantly, it echoes a vision of the internet that I hope we can reclaim. This essay by Maria Ferrell and Robin Berjon talks a bit about how the internet would function better if we would rewild it. Encourage an ecosystem where individual creators can build and share information freely, independent of particular platforms.
One thing that gives me hope is that the same tools I use to build gardens of docs make publishing a blog relatively easy and painless. What’s interesting to see from this piece is how platforms like Vimeo OTT give them the freedom to build their own subscription services for comedy streaming, independent of dependency on ad revenues. It’ll be interesting to see how technologies like atproto can help facilitate cultivating your own ecosystems further.