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Comment by dwild | Hacker News Reader

> It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses.

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.

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I worked at the company that owned Cracked.com prior to it selling to Conde Nast, and I was always blown away by the TINY team they had producing all that content. Granted they were supported by a much larger parent corp, but it definitely demonstrated to me that you don't need a lot to create a lot.

Seems like a dramatic announcement if this was just a big downsizing. Seems more like a shut down with a few hail Mary moves to try to turn it into a big downsizing.

> Seems like a dramatic announcement if this was just a big downsizing.

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.

Subscribers is a weak measure because some channels produce one new video a month and some produce a video or more every day that only a portion of subscribers watch.

You got a good point there, CollegeHumor only got 2/3 of views than Linus Tech Tips and their production cost are clearly higher. Should still allow to pay for a smaller staff and hope that they can get enough out of Dropout to pay for higher production. Most of what they do can be done with minimal production cost though, so there's still cut that can be done on that part I'm sure.

I'd be surprised if many of these "employees" weren't actually contractors or part-time roles as is typical of institutions which lean heavily on college-attending employees who need to work around their class schedule or are purely entry level on their way to a more traditional career.

Nothing about College Humor or "professional video we company" is particularly reliant on college student labor.

They were employees, not contractors or part-time

oh look, a gig economy

Most productions works like that. You create a single thing, when that thing is done, the work is done. TV shows and movies doesn't need updates or maintenance (well except Cats ;) ).

When you hire a plumber do go in your house, do you keep finding him stuff to do to keep him on the payroll?

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