Behind the Scenes of CollegeHumor’s Latest Hit

While comedy video sites like AOL and HBO’s This Just In, NBC’s DotComedy and Turner’s SuperDeluxe have died off after suffering through corporate bureaucracy, bad budgeting and lackluster traffic, CollegeHumor keeps out putting out savvy and hilarious original videos. There’s something about web content that (profitable!) CollegeHumor just seems to understand and anticipate better than anyone else.

I went behind the scenes last week to see how the site’s original video team works its magic, this time on its first — watch out Obama Girl! — political project: a mock trailer for the imagined “really bad Disney movie” to which actor Matt Damon compared Sarah Palin’s hockey-mom-to-vice president narrative.

The folks at CollegeHumor brought me along to their Palin shoot last week at a house in upstate New York that’s totally prepped for production and is often used as the set of the commercial parodies featured on Saturday Night Live. Liz Cackowski, the star of web series The Jeannie Tate Show and a former writer for SNL, was along to star as our ambitious hockey mom in her first CollegeHumor appearance. In the video above, I interview Cackowski and the CH team about the project and show a little of what it was like behind the scenes.

The shoot was large-scale by CollegeHumor standards, which has dramatically ramped up its production quality and team over the last two years, now with three different in-house production teams. Its budget was $8,000 — including $3,000 for the location and $1,000 for the steadicam — and didn’t account for the ten or so full-time CollegeHumor staffers who pitched in on everything from directing to picking up lunch.

Though CollegeHumor’s finished originals, including the “big budget” Palin video, never seem to include intrusive in-stream ads, the IAC-owned company recently became profitable. Why? CollegeHumor has managed to outrun the chicken-and-egg problem of funding good web content and attracting monetizable audiences. It can ride its momentum, keep upping the ante and regularly turn out hits: Four days after the Palin trailer was released, it has more than 600,000 views, 6,700 Diggs, and 273 comments.

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