Maybe this is a Ship of Theseus kind of thing. They get rid of almost all employees, empty the pipeline, and then retool. What's left of College Humor?
Is it really life support? Or simply, what is always should have been?
Do you really need 100 staffs for College Humor? For the production side, sure you may need quite a bit of staff for each individual production, but once a production is done, you no longer need them, but you still have to pay them. How long you'll have to pay them will be mostly based on luck (what are the odds that you can always produce something that require each individual staff qualification...).
It makes much more sense to have a minimal team, and then hire on a contractual basis based on the production needs.
A dramatic announcement? Their announcement was a few tweets on Sam Reich personnal twitter, which ends with this sentence: Independent comedy lives on -- just now more independent (gulp) than ever before.
What's dramatic was all the interpretations from everyone else (which does makes sense to see 90% layoff as something dramatic).
This is clearly a shutdown for IAC (though seems like they kept a minority stake, so they probably still have a tiny sliver of hope), but from my interpretation, this is simply a big downsizing for Sam Reich.
They got 15m+ total subscribers over a bunch of their channels, that's enough to support a team much bigger than 10 employees (Linus Media Group can support 30 with 10 millions subscribers) and on top of that they got Dropout.
When you hire a plumber do go in your house, do you keep finding him stuff to do to keep him on the payroll?
The company.