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I feel like I've been along for the ride with Dropout for a really long time. I first got into them when they were known as CollegeHumor back in the mid 2000s. It was kind of like my SNL. I remember watching Hardly Working, Jake and Amir, and some of their sketches that probably didn’t age the best.

One sketch I always come back to is Font Conference. I think the premise is just: what if fonts were people, and they had a meeting? It's an 18-year-old video, and there are lines from it burned into my brain. "Get with the times, New Roman." "Comic Sans, the boldest of them all."

What stands out to me is that a lot of the people in this video went on to do significant things. Sam Reich is in it, and he's the head of Dropout now. Streeter Seidel plays Old English, he’s currently Head Writer on SNL. Sarah Schneider also was Head Writer of SNL.  Jake and Amir are in it, and they started the podcast network HeadGum. If you look at this or any of their other old videos on CollegeHumor and you'll see a murderer's row of people who are very successful in the comedy world these days.

But perhaps no person has found such a unique corner of the internet as Sam Reich has with Dropout. He did so with the help of a creative staff and a revolutionary technology: clips posted on social media. Bear with me, it’s more impressive than it sounds.

Dropout is an independent comedy streaming service and the successor company of CollegeHumor. It costs $6.99 a month which gives one access to all their scripted and unscripted content. Dropout passed 1 million subscribers last October (TheWrap), and it's owned and run by Sam Reich, who also hosts two of its biggest shows. Almost everything on it is unscripted: games, improv and tabletop role-playing, with a rotating cast of comedians who turn up across shows. The ones you'll hear about most:

Beyond Reich, Mulligan and Michaelis, regulars like Jacob Wysocki, Rekha Shankar and Lou Wilson have built followings of their own. Some have moved on to bigger stages: Wilson is now the announcer on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Jeremy Culhane joined the cast of Saturday Night Live (TheWrap).

In April of this year, Ed Elson published "The Clip Economy" in his newsletter, Simply Put. His core line: "Clips are no longer the byproduct of the main product — they're the main product."

His main example is TBPN, the tech talk show OpenAI bought earlier this year. Elson writes that "the average TBPN show receives roughly 7,000 views per episode," while "the average TBPN clip receives around 257,000 views, thirty-seven times larger than the viewership of the show itself." TBPN puts the ads right in the clips: "Ads in clips are what enabled TBPN to generate $5 million in revenue last year." On the price OpenAI paid, he's upfront: he "was soon told by a friend that the deal was worth $200 million. That's not confirmed." The message he has for legacy media: "Either sell clips or die."

This may not read as being attached to Dropout on the surface. If you watch any clips on Dropout’s social channels, they aren’t advertising Nike or Pepsi. But that doesn’t mean Dropout is just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts (they are a capitalist organization afterall). The clips advertise one thing and one thing alone: Dropout itself. What's wild is there's this free real estate that Dropout could be monetizing, and I'm pretty sure they have AdSense on their YouTube channel, so that's pulling in money if they do. But the point of it really is to bring people into the funnel, and they give away a lot of this stuff for free.

To see why they landed there, you have to see what Dropout, then CollegeHumor, was running from. Wired's January 2020 piece on the company lays out the social-web squeeze: "Journalists lost jobs after their employers crafted strategies around Facebook video, only to discover that the social network had inflated its video metrics." YouTube was its own problem for a comedy company. Adam Frucci, a former director of development for Dropout, told Wired: "If there was a swear, all of a sudden the algorithm would ping your video and there would be no ad on it. So this video that you spent however many thousands of dollars on is suddenly not making any money."

CollegeHumor tried TV first. Per Wired, "In 2014, Reich pitched Barry Diller on taking a few dozen video employees and moving them to LA to begin growing the television arm of the company more aggressively." They planned to use their internet audience as a focus group for TV shows. Five shows made it onto basic cable, so it kind of worked out.

Reich explains why that wasn't enough in Dropout's 2018 launch video. Internet video is "challenging, mostly because it pays dick." On advertisers: "advertisers rarely want to make the same stuff we do." On TV: "we answer to the networks, and the networks answer to, you guessed it, Chompsky's Potato Chips." And on YouTube: "Nowadays, many of our YouTube videos are deemed controversial and don't make any money. Controversial can mean anything as small as, say, implied nudity." Basically, they had to rely on branded content or being paid “dick”.

So in September 2018, they launched Dropout. TechCrunch reported it would "start at $3.99 per month before adding different tiers." Reich's own pitch in the launch video: "It's like Netflix, but worse. And cheaper."

The first version of Dropout didn't work. Vulture explains the original thinking: "it would need scripted shows to justify the price of a subscription." But "while these shows were premium compared with what was available on YouTube, they couldn't compete with what was on Netflix." Reich told Polygon in 2023: "We set out with a lot of scripted content on Dropout, and it didn't really work." They went with unscripted, and my understanding is that unscripted is just a lot cheaper to produce because it needs less pre-production.

So IAC tried to sell CollegeHumor. Per Vulture, "IAC was reportedly looking for $100 million. A company that 'rhymes with Schmiacom,' Reich says, offered $3 million for CollegeHumor and Dropout's back catalogue." One can only wonder what Dropout would look like in the Warner-Paramount-Skydance universe…

Reich had another idea. He wondered if they could focus solely on unscripted content and be profitable that way.  Vulture writes. "He made his pitch: IAC sells CollegeHumor, and thus Dropout, to Reich for $0, divesting itself from any financial commitment, and in exchange keeps a minority stake." IAC took the deal. In January of 2020, the “CH-apocolypse” happened. The 105-person staff was whittled down to just seven. Reich's own announcement didn't sugarcoat it: "While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose."

Then the timing got worse. It took a few months to close the deal and by that time it was March of 2020. COVID halted all production for the studio trying to rise from the ashes.  Reich put it more bluntly to Fast Company: "We don't sign our deal until March, two days before lockdown here in LA. So great timing."

It wasn't like going from Disney Channel to Disney+. They were asking people to follow a different thing entirely.

Here's what turned it around. Per Vulture, "Reich started posting Game Changer clips to his personal TikTok account, and he noticed they could garner hundreds of thousands of views this way. In the comments of each post, people were asking, 'What's this show?'" He posted one of their flagship shows to his personal TikTok. It was basically just delivering: hey, here's a sample of what you're going to get. It's kind of the free-sample strategy that Costco employs.

It shaped what they make, too. Vulture reports that "Reich and his team established a checklist of questions for new shows: Will it do well on social media? Is it worth nerding out about?" Make Some Noise is the clearest case: "Individual prompts perfectly slot into TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts." The show's "Bechdel Test prompt has 10.5 million views on TikTok alone — but if you watch the show on Dropout, it feels like a cohesive episode of television and not a series of clips." They could now build shows with clips in mind.

The principle there is that you have to think with distribution first. How are people going to actually consume this, if the goal is to get more people to come in? If you just stick with one group of people, you're going to need new people eventually.

Reich gave a number for it in a May 2026 interview with TheWrap: "organic social is the way that the lion's share of people, meaning probably like 85% of people, find out about Dropout." That's his estimate, not a published stat. TheWrap notes Dropout "passed 1 million subscribers last October." Meanwhile, Game Changer has an entire YouTube channel dedicated to Shorts, and as of today it has 2.53 million subscribers. One show's clip channel is more than twice the size of the whole paid service.

The seed was there at launch. TechCrunch's 2018 story said "there will be teasers released for each episode that should also work as standalone funny videos that are a couple of minutes in length." That's kind of the movie-trailer idea that came over to the internet.

But I feel like humans are smart enough to understand what a trailer is, and we're being spoon-fed a lot of movie trailers these days. How many times have you seen a trailer for a movie and felt like you just saw the whole movie? What Dropout's doing with these shorts and clips is: look, we're just going to show you some of these really great parts. They do put out trailers, but they're also sharing a lot for free, and that's part of the inclusivity thing to me. It's not hiding behind "if you want us to really show you who we are, you've got to subscribe and pay us money." It's: no, this is who we are, and if you want more of this, you're welcome to join us.

Every single clip they put out isn't a direct call to action to watch the full thing. It's: let's deliver some value where people are, and if they want more of it, here's where they can go. It's not a trailer. If you're selling something that lives off of these platforms, you have to play the game of those platforms, which means you need to get people to want to consume more and stick around.

Reich told TheWrap there's still a line: "The algorithm isn't going to feed the same person every 'Make Some Noise' clip from every episode, even if we were to release the whole episode on social, which we don't." On a phone, "There's like 66% of the show that you're not seeing because it's been verticalized." And "the most we ever release on socials is close to half [of an episode]." His joke: "We're counting on people having not very good editing skills!" Of course there are going to be some people who just watch the clips. That still works, because the dedicated fans, the 1,000 true fans, are going to pay for it.

Compare that with Watcher. In May 2024, Variety reported that Watcher "announced that going forward, full seasons of new shows will be available only on a new streaming service (watchertv.com) — priced at $5.99/month or $59.99/year." Fans hated it. YouTuber Larry Bundy Jr.'s take: "Putting all your videos behind a paywall is the nail in the coffin for an internet career."

Dropout said the opposite on day one. Reich, in the 2018 launch video: "A lot of you aren't gonna wanna pay for this, and that's fine. We'll still be releasing all of the free videos we normally do." They still do it. I'm looking at the end screen of one of their videos right now: there are nine full Game Changer episodes, just free.

Same with live shows. Reich told Fast Company: "Live we do not see as a moneymaking opportunity at all." They do it for marketing and for content. And live is almost free marketing too, because they've got a dedicated fan base that's going to make its own content, taking their own videos and sharing them. Dropout is, from my perspective, cool with people sharing clips.

It paid off. "By the end of 2022, Dropout had around 350,000 subscribers," per Vulture, and when "Game Changer premiered its new season in April, … Dropout acquired 100,000 new subscribers." Then, from TheWrap, it "passed 1 million subscribers last October, marking a 31% growth year-over-year." Reich told TheWrap "there's no public shareholders, there's no private equity, there's literally no one to please but me." And Vulture reports that "since the end of 2023, Dropout has shared profits with every person it pays a dollar to," which Reich says "ranges from a tenth to a quarter of a person's total earnings."

I love that they do the profit sharing. It's great, because the people making your stuff are helping you do what you're doing. Compensate them. If you write a newsletter or have a podcast and you're not sharing the profits with those who help you make it, consider doing so to make sure they stick around.

Reich's line to TheWrap sums it up: "We want to do 'Better Internet,' not worse streamer." They're making a lot with a little. Do more with less. It's a thing we've heard a lot, but I think creative constraint breeds creativity. There have to be some constraints to be creative.

So here's my answer to Elson. He's right that clips are the product now. But a clip can be an ad slot, or it can be a doorway. Reich told Polygon in 2023: "We are very lucky, very lucky, that social media has turned out to be such a good way for us to market this platform. And we are also gleefully no longer beholden to it." I think it's interesting that they're not beholden to social media, but they recognize it's really powerful at amplifying their platform and driving subscribers. His advice to creators: "My advice is find a better business model."

I think that's core to what I'm saying. To do something sustainably, you need to make your thing worth it wherever you're putting it out there. It's like pushing back against slop. How can what I'm putting out there help someone, or bring value? That value could just be to get a laugh, or to think differently about something. It doesn't need to be "here's how you make millions of dollars." But if you're not thinking through the value of putting this out there, then you're just making slop.

You've got to put your best foot forward, and not be afraid to put some of your best ideas out there for free. That's what Dropout has shown. Some of their funniest stuff is out there for public consumption when they could be monetizing it. But in reality, it brings people back around: oh, there's more of this stuff, I want more of this. That's where you find the depth, when people actually consume it on the platform.

When they retired the CollegeHumor name in 2023, the anniversary video had a line I keep thinking about: "Art isn't made by AI for algorithms. It's made for people by people." And then: "Rest in peace, CollegeHumor. We're Dropout now. Your dad's gonna keep calling it CollegeHumor."