It’s that time of year again. OfficeMax and JibJab have just launched the latest edition of ElfYourself, the massively popular website that features dancing elves you can customize to feature the faces of you and your friends. The site, which serves as a promotion for OfficeMax, has turned into an Internet phenomenon, drawing many millions of visitors a year.
ElfYourself started back in 2006, when it received a surprising 36 million views in its first year. In 2007, it took the web by storm, with a whopping 193 million views. In 2008, the company teamed with JibJab to power the site (one of JibJab’s specialities is creating customized videos like these, so it was a good fit). However, there was a significant dropoff between 2007 and 2008 — last year the site drew 55 million views. That dropoff wasn’t a surprise though: JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis says that the company decided to require users to register in order to share their videos with their friends, when previous years hadn’t required registration.
The folks at JibJab continue to pump out some of the funniest customized videos on the web. Last month they forged a deal with master parody maker Weird Al to bring custom versions of the song writer’s music video to the site. And today they’re announcing a partnership with Soul Train, the long-running music TV program that featured countless artists from genres including R&B, soul, and hip hop over its 35 years on the air. You’ll now be able to stick yourself (or your friends) in the 70’s-era dance video below and watch the hilarious results.
JibJab has been making similar videos for quite a while, and has built up an impressive repertoire of licensed content including videos from Snoop Dogg and High School Musical.
We’re big fans of JibJab, the popular comedy site that offers an arrary of original parody videos and Ecards, most of which you can customize with goofy pictures of your friends. The site has previously Elfed the TechCrunch crew, stuck our editors into a Pepsi Ad and more. But tonight, JibJab is really outdoing itself, adding an extra boost of star power that takes its videos to the next level: it’s letting you appear in a music video with parody song legend Weird Al.
Scoff all you want, but the man really is quite brilliant (for the record, I’ve had Amish Paradise memorized for the last 13 years). He’s also got quite a following, with 950,000 followers on Twitter. The JibJab video is notable for being among the first officially licensed music videos that let fans customize the action using their own photos.
JibJab, a site popular for its parody videos and irreverent eGreetings, has closed a $7.5 million Series C funding round with participation from new investors Overbrook Entertainment (a production company co-founded by Will Smith) and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as existing investor Polaris Venture Partners. The company had previously raised around $9.4 million. The site generates a huge volume of traffic every year, and counts itself among the Top 100 most popular sites in the United States according to Quantcast (it currently ranks #73).
Over the holiday season JibJab recorded 60 million visits as users created 35 million personalized eCards on the site – figures that were likely boosted by the very popular ElfYourself videos that let you stick your face on a dancing elf.
A year ago, one of the surprise holiday breakout hits on the Web was ElfYourself.com. It was a promotional viral video site created by OfficeMax that let people upload their pictures and create dancing elves that they could then send as e-cards to family and friends. ElfYourself turned out to be the fastest growing site last December, peaking at 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. (and attracting a total of 100 million unique visitors worldwide throughout the campaign).
When Greg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab Media, saw ElfYourself, it resonated with him because JbJab is organized around a similar series of “Starring You” videos that allow people to upload their photos so that they can star in the videos, and send them as digital cards. The JibJab videos also often involve dancing characters.
JibJab has obviously figured out that pasting our pictures onto a video is a sure fire way to get a link from us. Here’s the latest, although I still like Gizmoz’s effort a lot more.
Nice to see Om Malik doing the moves so soon after his hospital visit.
We’ve written before about JibJab’s Sendables electronic video greeting cards that cost $0.50 to $3 each. Now, they found a sponsor in Pepsi for two holiday greeting videos through former Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun’s new company BermanBraun, which works with Pepsi to create online video branding opportunities like this one. You can upload a photo of your head and that of your friends (or frenemies) to personalize the cards, just as you can with JibJab’s Starring You series. A “This Sendables is free thanks to Diet Pepsi Max” message flashes for a few seconds before the greeting starts, and if you don’t blink, you will see that you are actually part of the promo. In the Snowball Fight card below, which the folks at JibJab made for us, you can see Mike and me in elf costumes doing a cartwheel over the sponsorship message. So not only can the audience now star in JibJab videos, but it is also being roped into pitching products. Hey, where are our royalties?
And now a message from Jibjab’s sponsor [Update: The Pepsi ad only appears on JibJab.com, not in the embedded player below]:
Unlike JibJab, which takes a still 2D image and moves only the mouth up and down, Gizmoz has developed proprietary technology to create a 3D facial image and includes various expression changes as well as lip syncing.
Their basic product, which allows users to create talking avatars, launched in May 2006.
Users can now take their avatar image and insert it into a number of video clips. More clips will be added over time, and Gizmoz is also in the process of licensing video from Hollywood movies and other professional content. Founder Eyal Gever actually showed me a clip over a year ago that had my face on a James Bond clip from Casino Royale. I felt pretty cool that day.
Gizmoz, which raised $6.3 million from Benchmark, is headquartered in Israel.
Los Angeles based JibJab continues to expand its business beyond its traditional political satires. They’ve recently released a for-pay virtual greeting card business called Sendables that will appeal to many people (like me) with a slightly dark sense of humor. The video above is one of my favorites. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Users get to send one or two greetings for free by email. After that, they cost $0.50 to $3. They’re taking on American Greetings directly, which sells annual subscriptions for $14 (and have an $85 million/year business). JibJab has raised just under $10 million in two rounds of financing.
On a related note, if you have a tech related ghost story, send it over to CrunchGear (and check out their fake haunted swing video).
This just went live from JibJab. There are now two new movies in their Starring You line of animations where you can upload your head to star in the movie. Here’s one with Arrington and me called Unnecessary Force, which jibjab kindly made for us. I tried to stop him folks.
Also check out Math Camp Massacres. (For more on Starring You, check out this video).
JibJab, the creators of the famous 2004 U.S. presidential election parody cartoon “This Land” have a new original video out called “The News,” embedded above. The new video premiered tonight at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.
JibJab is slowly expanding from pure content creation to becoming a hub for humor-related video and other media. In October we mentioned their Great Sketch Experiment.
In my opinion, “The News” isn’t as good as previous content from JibJab, although things really pick up at the 1:20 mark.
The company was founded by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis and is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. JibJab raised a Series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris Ventures in June.
If you have no idea what JibJab is, turn the volume up on your computer and start with their original parody cartoon of the 2004 U.S. presidential election called “This Land,” which has been viewed more than 80 million times. Then go watch all of their other original cartoons here.
JibJab is now leveraging their brand to expand beyond a few self-produced parody videos. In April 2006 they launched JokeBox, an area of the site where users can upload their own video, photo, audio or text jokes. Over 15,000 jokes have been uploaded and are categorized by “most popular” and other categories. It’s one of the better joke libraries that I’ve found on the Internet. As an aside, I’ve recommended to JibJab that they provide a RSS feed of the most popular jokes, and allow users to set the format for enclosures (iPod, etc.). With the new iTunes subscription feature you can always have the last few video jokes on your iPod.
This morning JibJab is launching another new product, called “The Great Sketch Experiment.” They’ve hired director John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers, Three Amigos) to produce six short films featuring a number of comedians. Viewers vote on the six films and the winner receives a $10,000 prize.
View the videos here – my favorite is “Tom and Tina.”
The company was founded by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis and is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. JibJab raised a Series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris Ventures in June.
Beyond the fact that this is great content, this is another sign that venture capitalists are taking original content sites seriously. Polaris has also invested in Heavy, a content site for 18-34 year old men. And recent investments in blog networks are further examples of this trend.
