Peter Kafka

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CollegeHumor CEO Paul Greenberg Leaves

CollegeHumor CEO Paul Greenberg, who joined IAC’s comedy website in 2010, is leaving the company.

CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen says Greenberg’s position will be filled by two executives from Electus, the IAC-owned movie and TV studio: Chief Operating Officer Drew Buckley, and corporate development VP Shane Rahmani, who joined the company a few months ago.

Via email, Greenberg has nice words for his former co-workers, but doesn’t say where he’s going next: “It’s been a terrific three years at CollegeHumor, and I decided it was time to move on to a new challenge. I’m very proud of everything we accomplished, and I know the team will continue to be successful.”

Greenberg joined CollegeHumor after a short stint at Time Inc., and a longer one running TV Guide Digital. At CollegeHumor, he accelerated the website’s push into video, and the site is now one of YouTube’s most popular producers — though it makes most of its video-advertising money on its own site.

The company has also been experimenting with selling some video directly to its 15 million monthly visitors. Two years ago, it turned its “Jake and Amir” Web series into a 30-minute mini-film and sold that on its site and on Facebook. This week, it released “Coffee Town,” a full-length feature film, and is selling that one via pay TV and outlets like iTunes and Amazon.

IAC bought a majority stake in CollegeHumor and other companies Van Veen helped create, including video-sharing site Vimeo, in 2006.

For the past few years, there has been recurring industry chatter about rolling CollegeHumor up with other dude-centric properties, like IGN. More recently, I have heard that IAC executives have been floating the idea of selling off CollegeHumor to a big media conglomerate, like Viacom or Time Warner. But, as far as I can tell, none of that has gotten past the chatter stage, either.

Here’s what appears to be Greenberg’s CollegeHumor swan song — an extended cameo in one of the site’s “Jake and Amir” videos, published this week:

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— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google