Wasting Others Time Takes Guess Work

One of the highlights of PSFK Conference New York 08 was Ricky Van Veen’s talk on how he created CollegeHumor.com – a site that distracts millions each month by collecting and making viral comedy. In the New York Times, Streeter Seidell, a front-page editor for the site, talks about how difficult it is to decide what’s funny:

So we sure seem to know what we’re doing, huh? To be honest, though, we don’t. Nobody in the online content business truly does. The taste of the Internet user is as idiosyncratic as it is fickle. What is popular and funny one day could be clichéd and boring the next… There are certain common traits of viral content that loosely guide our selections — it should be short, easily understood, universal, nostalgic — but for every hit sharing those qualities there are millions of similar failures, not to mention stuff that simply defies explanation.

…And so my co-workers and I find ourselves paid to waste time based partly on our ability to guess what will be popular. (I say partly because the other half of the job is content creation.) Isn’t this a fun economy, aside from all the layoffs and foreclosures? It’s true: Without the benefit of a trusted formula, much of the work of picking content for the site boils down to instinct (read: guessing) mixed with analysis and a healthy dose of argument.

NY Times