HackCollege: Podcasting, video and the early creator economy

HackCollege was a video podcast, blog and web show about technology and lifestyle for college students. In 2007, my co-founder Kelly Sutton and I noticed two mega-trends: 1) this was the first generation of students leaving home who were more apt to Google something than call their mom 2) even though they were strapped for cash, they had world class broadband connections piped right into their dorm rooms.

Search, video and podcasting combined to ride those waves of growth and whitespace. We were able to establish an authoritative “life hacking” website that was loyally bookmarked and searched, becoming one of the top 1000 Alexa-ranked sites on the internet. That journey led me to global tech conferences, getting recognized in the airport, writing for Wired Magazine, Barack Obama following me on Twitter and eventually an exit to HigherEducation.com, now a part of Red Ventures (Bankrate, Lonely Planet). Growing a new media business through audience analysis is part of my DNA and informs my approach to business: entrepreneurial experimentation and working backwards from the customer.

A College Content Strategy: Video Podcast, Search and Early Social Media

We built HackCollege as a multi-format brand before that was really a strategy… motivated mostly by our being film students and obsessing about getting video out on the web. Building a search-friendly blog combined with audio and video turned out to diversify discovery and monetization. Practical blog posts based on our real experiences captured high-intent search traffic (“how to fix dorm WiFi,” “cheap textbooks,” “best note-taking apps”), while longer-form evergreen guides compounded over time through SEO when there was very little competition for student content on Google. In parallel, we leaned hard into video podcasting at a time when YouTube was still early and Apple had just normalized video consumption through iTunes, video iPods and soon iPhones.

Distribution wasn’t an afterthought; it was baked into our ops, with RSS, early social platforms and a new strategy (at that time!) of spinning out short-form highlight-worthy moments from a longform video podcast into clips that could promote the core brand. The web show gave the brand personality and created a feedback loop: topics that performed in search informed episodes, and episodes created shareable moments that fed discovery. We paid close attention to keyword trends, referral sources, the comments section and on-site behavior to continuously refine editorial priorities—doubling down on content that solved real student problems and quietly moving on when it got too nerdy or niche.

Inventing Diversified Forms of Creator Monetization

My co-founder Kelly was committed skipping cheap banner advertising like AdWords to preserve a cleaner experience for better growth. This pushed us toward higher-value forms of monetization like brand partnerships, native advertising, events and content licensing. We wrote advertorial sponsored posts, added sponsor reads to podcasts and video; we even held sponsored events at UCLA and SXSW.

We developed brand sponsorship relationships with companies and start-ups that wanted to authentically reach college students—some of these were mega brands like HP, Shutterfly and Squarespace. One of our key signals was to find companies with “street teams” on college campuses and work our way up the chain to a CMO. As the video podcast gained traction, we licensed non-exclusive distribution to campus TV networks and one of the earliest YouTube MCNs, Revision3, which expanded reach while creating a baseline recurring revenue stream. Later, I joined Revision3 to grow their YouTube brands and it exited to Discovery Communications.