Jib Jab’s Year in Review
Jib Jab has reached near icon status, creating a variety of different orginal cartoons that provide a satirical look at everything from politics to big box retail to prescription drugs. Here is a link to the Jib Jab Originals. The site itself is nothing out-of-this-world, filling a somewhat common niche that YouTube, StupidVideos, and eBaumsworld share, but Jib Jab has it’s own unique spin.
Founded in 1998 by a pair of brothers, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the company has been around for almost 10 years, has an original clip that has been viewed over 80 million times, and is one of the best examples of viral marketing. An combination of business smarts and award winning art talent, the two brothers and their website managed to survive the dot com crash by creating a toy based on a character in one of their originals, Nasty Santa, writing a children’s book for Disney, and producing a series of shorts for Sony. In 2004, with the release of This Land (linked to earlier in the post), the site took itself to the next level.
Jib Jab now releases their video on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They use their subscribers’ images in their shorts, with over 1000 different faces in Big Box Mart (linked to earlier in the post), and with their second Year in Review being released yesterday night. These types of sites that combine traditional or standard digital content with a splash of their own original content will become more valuable as the trend towards online media continues. Having already tackled more traditional sources of revenue (that are less traditional online), Jib Jab will likely be one of the more interesting online stories that represents this decade.