VAN VEEN

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Ricky Van Veen is the co-founder and Editor in Chief of CollegeHumor, a popular comedy website. He created the site as a student at Wake Forest and it quickly became a mainstay. Van Veen’s site was earning between $5–10 million dollars a year before the partners sold a controlling stake to IAC/InterActiveCor.

He is also one of the principal owners and founders of Connected Ventures, a company formed around CollegeHumor that included BustedTees and Vimeo. Van Veen also holds a patent for a foam version of The Shocker, an obscene sexual gesture.

CollegeHumor co-creator and editor in chief Ricky Van Veen is graduating to a new venture at Barry Diller’s IAC. But Mr. Van Veen is hoping to move beyond YouTube-friendly jokes for the dorm-dwelling set.

“When people tell you Web content is better than television content, they probably don’t mean that, they probably enjoy the format of the Web better than the format of TV,” he added.

But TV is still struggling with the pull of the Internet –and figuring out how to grab the same kind of excitement from millions of views of a CollegeHumor clip made on a skeleton budget and bring that buzz into the living room (and beyond).

Van Veen remains CollegeHumor’s editor. He often appears in some of the company’s video series such as Jake and Amir and Hardly Working and MTV’s The CollegeHumor Show.