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Ingles Reading

1) Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen started the humor website CollegeHumor in 1999 as college freshmen after hearing another site was making $20,000 per month from ads. 2) They created content they thought college students would find funny and spread word of the site through flyers and free t-shirts, gaining 60,000 monthly viewers within months. 3) By 2005, the site had millions of viewers each month and in 2006 Abramson and Van Veen made $6 million from ads and t-shirt sales, having expanded the site beyond just photos and videos.

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183 views2 pages

Ingles Reading

1) Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen started the humor website CollegeHumor in 1999 as college freshmen after hearing another site was making $20,000 per month from ads. 2) They created content they thought college students would find funny and spread word of the site through flyers and free t-shirts, gaining 60,000 monthly viewers within months. 3) By 2005, the site had millions of viewers each month and in 2006 Abramson and Van Veen made $6 million from ads and t-shirt sales, having expanded the site beyond just photos and videos.

Uploaded by

Felix Valencia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Reading Assessment A03

Name: Date:

Read the article. Then type the phrases in the correct categories in the chart.

Hilariously Successful

J osh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen started the website CollegeHumor in 1999. At the time, they were freshmen in
college. Abramson said that he had heard about another humor website that had been making $20,000 a month from
ads. He wondered if he and his friend could make money from a humor website. It turns out they could.

Abramson and Van Veen thought about what kind of website they wanted to start and decided to create a site with content
that college students would find funny. Abramson stated that it was easy to get college students to look at funny pictures and
videos, so he and Van Veen thought it would be fairly easy to build an audience for their website. At first, they posted
pictures of silly things that they and their roommates were doing. Abramson’s brother worked for an ad company and
explained that they could make a lot of money with ads if they could get thousands of people to look at the CollegeHumor
site. Abramson and Van Veen made flyers with jokes and funny pictures telling students about the site. Abramson drove to
several universities and posted the flyers on campuses. Then he started mailing flyers to people at other universities, and he
included a free T-shirt in each package. He told people to keep the T-shirt and asked them if they would post the flyers on
their campuses.

The website started to get visitors, and other people started sending photos and videos for the site. After a few months,
60,000 people a month were looking at Abramson and Van Veen’s website, and they were making about $8,000 a month on
ads. The website continued to grow in popularity, so the friends decided to keep working on the website even after college.
They also started selling T-shirts on the site. By 2005, the site had millions of viewers each month, and in 2006, Abramson
and Van Veen made about $6 million from ads and T-shirt sales.

Van Veen said that they had intended for many of the jokes on the site to be stupid jokes for smart people. He also said that
it was important to keep the humor of the site relevant to college students. So, after graduating from college, Van Veen and
Abramson continued to hire college-age students to write for the site. The website expanded to contain comics, articles,
interviews, games, and web series, in addition to photos and videos.

In 2006, Abramson and Van Veen sold 51% of their company, so they no longer control the website. However, the website
is still going strong. For example, over 100 million people view CollegeHumor videos each month.

The website’s humor isn’t for everyone. The site is meant to appeal to young people in their late teens and early 20s, and it
is more popular with men than it is with women. A lot of the jokes can be offensive. For example, in some of the videos,
people are getting hurt in ridiculous ways. Some may find the humor in poor taste, or they just don’t get the jokes. On the
other hand, CollegeHumor does make millions of people laugh.
••

•••

ONLY JOSH ABRAMSON ONLY RICKY VAN VEEN BOTH ABRAMSON AND
VAN VEEN

28. 31. said the site’s stupid jokes 32. continued with the website
were for intelligent people after graduating
• had a brother who worked
in advertising

29. 33. made a lot of money from


clothing sales
first had the idea to create a
website for profit

30.

put up ads at several


universities

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