How Dropout Cracked Internet Comedy

On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, a comedy streaming platform that’s found success eschewing the growth-at-all-costs model of the mega streamers. The two discuss the pre-You Tube days of online video and how Reich acquired Dropout, formerly known as the internet site College Humor, for $0. They talk about how comedy has evolved online, how to build a cinematic universe of content, and whether Reich sees Dropout as a feeder for places like Saturday Night Live. Reich shares his philosophies on how to make things that people love and why he steers away from the venture-capital and big-media playbooks.The following is a transcript of the episode: Sam Reich: I’m an open book. Charlie Warzel: Oh, very exciting. Reich: I am a creased-open, dusty, worn library book with too many dog-eared pages. [Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about how to make things online that people actually enjoy.We are living through an era of pretty remarkable media consolidation—the streaming wars started out scrappy, and they have landed in this place where we now have this constellation of increasingly expensive apps and media catalogs. It’s a kind of an on-demand reconstruction of the old-school-cable package, but for arguably more money. The streamers themselves—they’ve become pretty hard to root for. Gone are the days of password-sharing, which means that people can find themselves in this constant rotation of tracking down individual shows, signing up for the free trial, bingeing, and then waking up in a cold sweat three months later, realizing that you’re still paying for Paramount+.Streamers have given us genuine content abundance, which is great. But it’s not without its issues as well. These endless libraries have created a decidedly gilded problem of endless perus