Update 6/27/08: The round is now confirmed. Additional investors include DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and Evergreen Venture Partners

Israeli-based animation site aniBoom is about to announce a $10 million B round, a source tells us. We believe the round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, although the company won’t confirm this. An announcement is expected on Monday. The company previously raised $4.5 million in February, 2007.

AniBoom wants to be the YouTube of animation, and provides a distribution platform for professional and semi-pro animators to show their creations. It draws from the talent pool on its site to co-produce animation series with contributors, who get paid for their work. (See our review here). The site competes with MyToons. Below is CEO Uri Shinar’s Elevator Pitch recorded at the Crunchies:

Uri Shinar is looking for a hit. But the CEO of animation website aniBoom (see earlier TechCrunch coverage here) thinks he can find one by creating a platform for talented, aspiring animators worldwide. A former Israeli-TV bigwig, Shinar is credited with helping to establish Israel’s No. 1 commercial TV station. Now he is trying to lay the foundations for a Web-based animation studio with aniBoom, and move it beyond the “YouTube-of-cartoons” pigeonhole it occupies today.

Shinar has produced quite a bit of television programming and along the way gained a hands-on appreciation for the cost, complexity and luck needed to develop and execute a financially lucrative success. This is why he sees the Web as the ideal incubator to form an animation studio driven by user contributions. On Monday, he is planning to announce an advisory board that includes John Mass (head of corporate development and new ventures at the William Morris Agency), Peter Hirshberg (chairman of Technorati), and Barbara Corday (the TV producer who created Cagney and Lacey).

Shinar is molding aniBoom with an eye towards the best that Web 2.0 has to offer when it comes to content creation, collaboration and production cost. But he wants to marry that with a more traditional pipeline for mainstream media distribution, including merchandising. I recently spent some time with Shinar, who explained to me that an animation studio such as aniBoom needs one big hit to get a snowball effect going. But these days hits can come from the most unexpected places. As he sees it, the hit aniBoom is hunting for is best exemplified by a frog, and no, it’s not Kermit…

A Goldmine Called “Crazy Frog”

The charming creature pictured at right is none other than Crazy Frog, aka, “The Annoying Thing”. Check out this video to get a taste of the frog and to hear the sound that launched an international merchandising bonanza, especially in Europe, Australia, and Japan. It is not an aniBoom animation, but it the type of content Shinar wants to help discover or produce.

When the worlds of animation, licensing, and merchandising collide, a big hit translates to big, big bucks. In this sense Crazy Frog embodies everything that aniBoom is striving for.

In 2005, the Crazy Frog franchise made over $79M through the sale of mobile ringtones alone. Now look at the cumulative merchandise sales estimates on the left and it becomes evident just how much money a single hit can generate. Do the math and ask yourself how many startups you can name that generate such sales figures? I bet many of you are scratching your heads real hard right now.

The crazy thing about crazy frog is that there was no master plan behind its making: In 1997, a Swedish teenager recorded himself impersonating a two-stroke engine and then uploaded the recording to the Web where it began spreading virally. In 2003, another Swede added the animation featuring the Crazy Frog character. A year later, a German company called Jamba! licensed both sound and animation and the phenomenon was scaled to a sensation.

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Israeli-startup AniBoom just went live with an animation channel on Joost to launch, the peer-to-peer Internet TV service. AniBoom is an animation site with 30,000 videos, contributed from about 3,000 animators around the world. AniBoom, which competes with MyToons, currently splits advertising revenues with animators who contribute to the site, and holds an annual $50,000 contest to attract the best animations. Now the best of those will be featured on the Joost channel as well (with ad revenues being split three ways amongst AniBoom, Joost, and the animators).

Here’s an oddly disturbing, yet captivating, AniBoom short called Bendito Machine:

It is our luck to have two excellent user generated animated video sites now live – Israel-based Aniboom and, starting today, MyToons, which just came out of private beta.

MyToons certainly has the edge over Aniboom on design and overall usability, although I found site navigation to be slow this morning. With both sites, users upload short animated films that they’ve created, or have copyright permission to use. Videos are organized by tag, user, most watched, most highly rated, etc.

I love this stuff, and I spent quite a bit of time browsing videos before choosing the one embedded above (although I’m not too sure that particular video complies with MyToon’s copyright policy).

MyToons is also trying to be family friendly, and says they’ll censor out content that would constitute a NC-17 rating in the U.S. If we’re talking about pornographic content, it will be a clear enough line. But if they start to censor out swearing and other fuzzily inappropriate content, the site will suffer.

Israeli Startup Aniboom has raise $4.5 million in an initial round of financing. At least that’s what TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon tells me this page says. The round was led by Israeli venture firm Evergreen.

The site has very good user generated animated videos presented in a Flash player and embeddable in other websites. My favorite Aniboom video is embedded at the end of the post (I also used this example in our previous coverage of Aniboom).

Aniboom is neck and neck with newcoming MyToons in the race to become the “YouTube of Cartoons.” Both sites are excellent, although MyToons is still in private beta.

Update: Liz Gannes comments below to let us know that this news is weeks old. Our bad.

Israeli startup AniBoom, a Flash video site for original animated short films, officially launches tomorrow, although the site has been live since late September. To kick things off they are holding a $50,000 contest for the most highly rated films – $25,000 to the winner and five additional $5,000 prizes.

Jeff Pulver noted them as well a couple of weeks ago after meeting the founders. The quality of the content so far is excellent, although copyrighted material is showing up on the site already.

One of the currently highest rated films is embedded below.