CollegeHumor Guys' Secret Success: T-Shirts
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
--- "Last week, Josh Abramson told us that he and Ricky "might start a few new sites [and/or] we might be making a few small acquisitons," but wouldn't elaborate."
They already have a new one -- http://todaysbigthing.com -- and it's actually good, one of those single purpose sites.
"So what is that? Making more media, we gather."
Interestingly, the T-shirts are actually a form of media for delivering jokes.
The main issue being that it costs you a ton of money to produce inventory you probably won't be able to move. The economics only make sense only when the entire nation is buying your t-shirts. It's all loss-leading to get to that point, though.
Getting 144 t-shirts printed with one color costs about 500 dollars, including the shirts. You can sell these for $20, which means you make about $2300. You don't really need to make more than 144 (unless you are at the level of CollegeHumor) because there are so many just-in-time style print shops. If you sell out, you can have another run made in less than a week.
But more to your point: even if the copyright problems were as widespread as you claim, it simply demonstrates a gap in the market that exists. There is obviously a demand for this copyrighted content online, and it's not because people are suddenly getting it free (since it was essentially free before). Luckily, there is a new demand for user-generated content as well. Now that there is a more equal playing field between traditional and user-generated media, it will be very interesting to see if the demand for traditional media keeps up. My guess is that it will become too expensive to compete, since people only place a certain premium on quality.
In terms of CollegeHumor, they have a lot of original content and have maintained a very good grip on what college kids like and think is funny. It is a mis-characterization to attribute all of their success to simply stealing other people's work. Nobody gets a free ride like that.