Since "This Land," they've been regular guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, launching new videos there and getting huge visibility before they even go viral online, and "What We Call The News" was recently launched at the Bush-attended Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington.
"From the beginning we saw the Internet as an incredible opportunity for creators to connect directly with an audience in a way that was never before possible," Spiridellis says in our interview. By offering incentives for registration, like access to premium content and the ability to vote and comment on content, JibJab can develop a relationship with their audience that lets them not only sell targeted advertising, but evaluate the performance of their content. "It lets you measure and connect with your audience," he explains. "I know exactly how many people are watching something. I know how many people are sending it. These are all metrics that I can use to evaluate the success."
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.
Article comments
1 - Clint Johnson
The reason that "television" will survive, even as it translates to the Internet as a deliver medium, is that creating quality episodic drama is expensive and that can't change. There are only so many good writers, directors, actors and editors to go around and they command a premium for their services. And it doesn't work to have a good writer and a so so director working with adequate actors, they all have to be there to bolster each other.
Canadian television producers have bigger budgets than any online content producer and they still fail to deliver quality content because the good creators and talent have moved to the US where the money is.
The chances that you can get five good writer, a good director and a dozen good actors to work for next to nothing... it is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable.
And even if that 0.000000001% possibility panned out, you would be relegated to a very narrow selection of material that could be created with any semblance of production values.
Sanctuary is there with production values but that costs over half a million dollars per 15-18 minute episode... and as far as I can tell, they are paying the talent largely with participation in a financial venture that is almost certain to be a money losing proposition.
You need deep pockets to create quality episodic drama and that can't change.
2 - Diane Kristine
Yup, that's pretty much Spiridellis' point, that the current system is great for producing hour and half hour productions for broadcast, and that won't change - there'll always be a market for that, and a short video, which is what the web does best, doesn't compete with that.
However, he points out - and I've heard this over and over again from TV industry people - that the system is not set up to do cheaper, shorter, made-for-web content. It hurts JibJab and it hurts teh TV industry, who are desperate to use the Internet to engage and build audiences. The next round of union contracts will either help or hinder the process, but there's other work to be done too.