CollegeHumor’s YouTube Channel Cracks 3 Million Subscribers

CollegeHumor has built a massive audience by building a network of content that caters to all comedic avenues. Whether you’re into the prank wars of Jake and Amir, the self-referential shenanigans of Hardly Working, or the occasional one-off parody video, CollegeHumor has something for you. Now, the massively popular channel has hit a milestone: it has reached three million subscribers on YouTube, becoming just the seventh channel to reach this mark.

CollegeHumor is just the seventh YouTube channel to break the three million subs barrier, joining Ray William Johnson, Ryan Higa, Smosh, Machinima, Jenna Marbles, and Freddie Wong. Of these seven, only CollegeHumor, Smosh, RWJ, and Machinima are also in the top 20 in views (CollegeHumor sits at 20th place in views, and it will pass the 1.5 billion views mark sometime within the next week.) To celebrate the milestone, the CollegeHumor gang has posted a brief video thanks all of the channel’s subscribers for tuning in.

What makes CollegeHumor’s accomplishment so significant is that, out of the top 10 most subscribed YouTube channels, the comedy giant is the only one that also drives significant traffic via videos outside of YouTube. CollegeHumor’s website drew 12.7 million unique viewers to its videos this past August, and upped that number to 13.5 million uniques in September.

Those numbers are incredible when you look at some of the channel’s contemporaries; for instance, Smosh also hosts all of its content in separate videos on its website, but these entries only get a few thousand views a piece. Machinima is one of several top networks whose website redirects all video traffic to YouTube. Meanwhile, on CollegeHumor, more than 150 videos have eclipsed a million views.

So what’s the secret to CollegeHumor’s success. Obviously, they’ve grabbed a ton of views by re-posting videos they do not own (Dramatic Chipmunk is one of the most popular videos on the site.) However, for me, CollegeHumor deserves a ton of credit for staying aware of current trends that they know will drive views. For instance, one of the channel’s recent videos is ‘Mitt Romney Style‘, which has drawn in 4.3 million views on YouTube and more than one million more on CollegeHumor. It’s not the best Gangnam Style parody out there, but it’s funny enough, features solid production values, and is very aware of what’s drawing views these days. It’s a formula that has worked for CollegeHumor in the past, and expect them to keep it up as they begin the journey to four million subs.