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. This led to an anticipated dropoff in virality, but it also resulted in a huge jump in JibJab’s userbase, which is more valuable to the company in the long run.

This year though, we can expect some more astronomical numbers, because JibJab has removed its required account registration. Instead, it’s deeply integrating Facebook Connect, which will give users one-click signin to the site and will also help ElfYourself go even more viral as videos get distributed through Facebook News Feeds.

Users can make their videos and share them across the web for free. They can also pay to have their elves printed on gift cards or greeting cards, or to download a version they can store locally.

Spiridellis also told us some of JibJab’s recent traffic stats: the site has 11.5 million unique visitors in October, up 229% over the same time period last year. 18 million views came from the site’s Monster Mash customized videos.

Below are two of the new videos the site is offering this year:

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

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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. Cofounder Gregg Spiridellis says that the site’s recent implementation of Facebook Connect, which lets users pull photos from the social network and share these customized videos with friends, has led to video virality tripling compared to normal sharing over Email.

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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. The official video is available for free for anyone to watch at JibJab.com (it’s also the same video that will be distributed to iTunes, MTV, etc.), but if you want to personalize using the ‘Staring You’ feature you’ll have to become a paid member. Memberships run $15.99 per year, or $7.99 per month.

This kind of video has proven very popular for JibJab — since launching the Starring You feature in August 2007, the site has seen 122 million streams from its homepage (the number of streams from embed likely puts that number over 200 million).

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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.

The site is best known for its widespread political parodies (if you didn’t see the This Land video during the 2004 election, you were probably hiding in a cave), but has also expanded in recent years to offer parody sketches and personalized E-greetings. The company generates revenue by offering premium eCards and content through a subscription service alongside its assortment of free cards, and also sells digital downloads and personalized gifts like mugs and mousepads.

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(The back story).

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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.

Spiridellis decided to look up ElfYourself’s traffic numbers on Quantcast, and this is what he saw:

For that one month, it rivaled Facebook in traffic. But Spiridellis thought JibJab could bring the site up a notch. In February, he cold-called the chief marketing officer of OfficeMax and proposed a partnership: JibJab would create new dancing elves around its Starring You platform. There would be not one dance, but three: Disco Elves, Jazz Elves, and Country Elves. There would also be the opportunity to sell digital downloads of the videos and personalized images printed out on cards, mugs, and mousepads.

It could turn ElfYourself from an expensive marketing cost into something that might actually make money. OfficeMax agreed and this year JibJab will run the site, which is scheduled to relaunch later this week. That’s a teaser shot above that JibJab sent us featuring some of the TechCrunch crew (Michael, Mark, Heather, and me).

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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.

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And now a message from Jibjab’s sponsor [Update: The Pepsi ad only appears on JibJab.com, not in the embedded player below]:

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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.

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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).

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Also check out Math Camp Massacres. (For more on Starring You, check out this video).

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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.

All of their original videos can be viewed here.

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.

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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.

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