 College Humor is laying off people big time the sketchy comedy giant College Humor just celebrated its 20th year online and According to tweets from the longtime executive Sam rick Reich the site is now fighting for its life College Humor's parent company IAC which is also owns match group is bailing on the business Leaving it with a few as five employees Bloomberg reports according to Reich a hundred plus brilliant people have lost their job Now the reason why I want to do this video has nothing to do with College Humor What it has to do with with business models and so this is a great case study, and this is affecting Everybody online. This isn't just College Humor. This is going to be affecting everybody Because for the most part, there's a lot of people when it comes to College Humor, they're gonna be blaming other people So one of the cases we'll call it humor is Facebook and they've been found out they were giving out fake data fake numbers saying hey look how much traffic our videos are getting Originally how College Humor had everything set up was they had it natively they own their own racetrack, right? So they drove traffic to their website. They own the data They own the customers they own the views and they can sell native advertising on College Humor.com however Facebook I guess convinced everybody forget your own property come over to Facebook then College Humor started going over to Facebook next thing You know if Facebook algorithms change same thing. They went over to YouTube YouTube algorithms change Their business model in a nutshell like most business models like I'm reading this off a fast company is advertising You know, this is how from the 90s the internet business model originated from this is like the holy grail business model Now you can point fingers over here as like hey It's Facebook's fault for changing the algorithms is Google's fault for changing algorithms And I'll pull this up over here too to show you something pretty crazy so, you know, I've been an SEO for a very long time and Trust me, you know SEO is one of the best, but you're at the fucking mercy You're at the mercy of Google and so here we go. I know Gabe put this up. Yeah, here we go. That's September College Humor. Look at this Right, so that's the big core update. Everyone got affected by this. Look at that boom Right, so they got hit and so YouTube algorithm changes Google algorithm changes Facebook algorithm changes at the end of day You don't own your racetrack now. What's going on over here? This is a great business case study for everybody to look at. I mean everybody And it's a great reminder to myself as well in younger aspiring entrepreneurs and anybody in the online spaces The the days of advertising are coming to an like I'm on, you know For me to access this off the off of fast company I had to fucking close a million ads and I'm just using Chrome So I don't have any my Chrome blockers. I mean my ad blockers here, but I just wanted to show you I usually use Brave or Opera, but there's a million ads I had to close. That's our business model. They sell native advertising They do ad networks and all these other types of advertising options for advertisers Now the problem is this is a dwindling business. The whole idea is clickbait Let's get as many eyeballs as possible Pitch this to our advertisers are gonna pay as big bucks so we can put their brand message in front of the users Man if you're not in the in the advertising industry a lot of this is dirty a lot of it It's click-baked horrible traffic fake traffic like I can tell you stories of Chinese bots ripping up websites saying it's authentic traffic and really by Google standard is Authentic meaning they're not bots per se. They're actually really humans. I never saw click farms in China or India They're literally fucking walls full of phones with different IPs with VPNs are bouncing and they have You can call them fake accounts, but they're not really fake accounts an actual manual human being clicking so for to Google and Facebook That's a that's a real user Right and so then they can take this website property They own this domain that they own go to advertisers and sell it It's all fake. No one gives a shit and so the profit margins are Shrinking and shrinking here at all the time companies are closing up this web 2.0 this way of doing business as we did since the 90s is Shrinking fucking away and companies can't keep up with that because they've been so addicted to the profits to get for advertisements But now more and more let's say spotlights coming out showing that the data's fake the traffic's fake Horrible experience over here like a million fucking ads over here the traffic's fake and At the end of the you as the advertiser I can't tell you you as the advertiser are not getting your return on Adspent ROI right return on ad spend right you're not getting it right because you're paying big bucks and you're not getting the right audience So this is a great case study to think about okay if content isn't my business model What is it then you know in case of college humor? I just made a thing on Twitter. I'll show you right now Honestly if I was college humor, I would make them into a brand e-commerce brand See I'm in the belief system of Gary Vee, right? It's your media company first distribution then the back-end business model j. Abraham talks about this right Most people focus on front-end business models, which is advertising. That's a front-end business model He's like click bait headlines click click click eyeballs email list. Let's sell this shit to everybody Everywhere, you know and it's getting like I said it's getting difficult even when I GDPR in Europe And California is rolling out. I know Canada's going to be rolling it as well And so if I was college humor what I would do I would do a back-end business model I would they have a great brand they can save it. I'm telling you they can save college humor They have great brand great history. They still have 13 million people on fucking youtube, which is huge, right? I'm pretty sure they can slowly bounce back off of their their google sco stuff It's going to take a long time. I think they fucked around there, but it's doable And I would sell products on the back end and it doesn't have to be a college humor e-commerce brand college humor is the media company that you have brands on the back end So it can be like you do some demographic deep dive on what kind of audiences you have And basically the whole idea is like drive traffic to college humor build a relationship Do not have ads add value add trust and then deviate that towards certain e-commerce products Which has a fucking amazing profit margin like huge ease your business in advertising Way better for logistics. You don't have to worry about clickbait. You don't have to worry about pleasing your advertisers You're not working for the advertisers. You're working for yourself. So I want to quickly make this video to show you my like This isn't just for college humor, man. They're gonna bounce back. I think I think that would a brand like that And with the history that they have I think just Rethinking their business models. They will bounce back like look at this. I went to another site t and w look at this shit, man like Fuck ads ads ads. They're everywhere, man. This model is gonna disappear So I just want to quickly make this video for you. Hope you find value in this And the moral of the story is rethinking business models Just rethink that before you start any business or if you're in a business today Really identify are you building back end business models as opposed to what most people focus on is front end business models Like always if you have a question leave a comment below this video Hit the like button subscribe and I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace