The Cranky Media Guy

Variety.com - MTV pairing IFilm with Spike

Here’s my favorite part of this story: “It will compete directly with other Web sites that target young men, such as CollegeHumor.com and Break.com.”

In the not-so-distant past, a certain little Mom and Pop media company you may have heard of, Time-Warner, started a website designed to compete with CollegeHumor.com.  It was called OfficePirates.com.  If you hurry, you can probably pick up that URL from GoDaddy for $6.95 for the next year.

OfficePirates.com was a HUGE failure, a complete stiff.  Golly, I can’t imagine why an “edgy” “humor” site created by the largest media company on Planet Earth failed to compete with CollegeHumor.com, a site that was, if I remember correctly, started by two twenty-somethings.  ‘Cause, you know, those multi-national corporations are a laugh a minute.  You ought to see HalliburtonHaHas.com.

Seriously, though, time after time after time, you see these big companies making the same mistake of thinking they can produce “edgy” (I HATE that word, but I can’t think of another one that I DON’T hate.  No, “snarky” ain’t it either.), funny content.

I can see the thinking that goes into shit like OfficePirates.com.  “If two slackers can make a site like that and get millions of hits, how can we, a HUGE company with virtually infinite resources, NOT be able to do the same? 

If that corpo-think makes sense to you, let me ask you a question.  Why has not one of the biggest phenomena of the Internet (or the whole fucking Internet itself for that matter) come out of a large corporation?  eBay, Yahoo, Google, craigslist, YouTube; all of them were created by people on the outside of the corporate structure.  Yeah, some of them have since been bought out by the MegaCorps of the world, but isn’t it telling that NOT ONE OF THEM was developed in-house at Viacom, NBC, Time-Warner or any of the other big media companies?

I think part of the reason is because the big corporations, by their very nature, cannot possibly run anything counter-culture (do people still use that term anymore?  Doesn’t matter, you get what I mean.) on any property they own.  Yeah, you *might* get something “wacky” like a silly cartoon of George W. Bush on one of the sites they own, but that’s about as far as they’re going to push the envelope.  They aren’t about to endorse anything that might really shake the canoe. 

Meanwhile, the “outsiders” who create the stuff people REALLY want on the Internet, say “fuck it” and put up the content THEY like.  You’ve seen South Park, right?  Do you think for one minute that a show like that could come from INSIDE a big corporation?  Yes, Matt and Trey, the creators of South Park, are pretty well set for life NOW, but that only happened because they managed to con Comedy Central into running their show, which then became a hit, making them essentially untouchable.

The corporate way would be to have an army of minimum-wage kids with clipboards hit the malls of America, asking people, “Would you like to see a TV show that features a handicapped boy whose only spoken word is ‘Timmay’?”  Every right-thinking American would cry “NO” to that question and the show would be still-born.  Which only goes to show you that focus groups are bullshit.  But that’s another rant for another day.

The bottom line here is that this piece of shit website that Viacom is going to “compete” with CollegeHumor.com with will be a HUGE stiff.