Though known for their original political and social short satires, including their hilarious year-in-review animations like "Nuckin' Futs," JibJab is also now a hub for user generated content with their JokeBox feature. Spiridellis claims it's the largest joke-sharing site – focused as they are soley on comedy — now with 750,000 registered members sharing 100,000 jokes.

The future of JibJab
At the festival panel, he explained that user-generated content is difficult to make money from, but great for building an audience. JibJab thinks of their original programming as tentpoles, each release causing traffic to spike, plateauing their regular traffic at a higher level, and in turn creating a larger and larger community gathered around regularly updated user-generated content and eagerly awaiting another JibJib original.

"What differentiates us is the original programming, and so we're doing more and more of that," says Spiridellis. "We're about to release a whole bunch of new product lines that will scale our original programming far beyond what we do now, which is a very big release every few months. In the next six months we hope to be releasing new originally produced programming every day."

He's vague on what the new product lines will entail, though I suspect there's clues in what he tells me if I were only savvy enough to fully pick up on them.

"What we're focusing on now is more actively engaging our users in our programming. It's not just hey, come to JibJab and watch something. It gets a little tricky because we have new product lines I can't talk about yet. But it's going to be, come to JibJab and engage, create, and publish, so it becomes more that the user can get their hands dirty with the content and spread it around as opposed to just watching."

At one point, he suggests that paying producers based on performance is part of their future plans. "We're trying to figure out ways to engage them in productions where they make some money for getting into business with us and in the event they create a hit, in the event they create a 'This Land,' they could make significant amounts of money. That's what we're trying to build now."

Working in Los Angeles, the brothers are confronted by the reality of a system of agents, managers, executives, and lawyers that was designed long before anyone thought of the Internet, never mind creating video content for it.

"It's so hard to get anything done," Spiridellis complains. "The whole system was created to produce a small number of really big investment productions, but with the web you've got to be able to produce a very big number of small productions."

"One of the problems we're trying to solve is how do we scale our production, because I can't make a production for a few thousand bucks if it's going to cost me five thousand to deal with the lawyers and everybody else."