PSFK Conference New York Speaker Ricky Van Veen

We’re pleased to have Ricky Van Veen, the 27-year-old co-founder of the hugely popular (and, even to these quite post-collegiate PSFKers, consistently entertaining) website College Humor speaking at PSFK Conference New York. Ricky will be sharing his experience of building and monetizing a niche content site, and how he turned it into the most popular humor website in the country.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m Ricky Van Veen and I’m the co-founder and Editor in Chief of CollegeHumor.com, which is the country’s most popular humor website and one of the leading sites for young males.

What do you hope the audience will learn from your talk, “Beer Money to Board Meetings: Lessons Learned from Building and Monetizing a Niche Web Content Business”? How has your business and industry changed since you co-founded College Humor in 1999?

I’d like to give the audience an idea of what we’ve done to solidify a core audience within a specific demographic (young males) and how we managed to leverage it into a national brand. When we started in 1999, we were one of the only games in town. Believe it or not, there’s a lot more content sites now. So we’re adapting the business to work around the increased competition and change in the industry as a whole. I’d like to shed some light on how we’re doing that because I think we’re on the right track.

Five websites that provide you with inspiration:

Tumblr

Netvibes

Flickr

DrudgeReport (really)

The Onion

Thanks, Ricky!