Comedic web animation house and video sharing site JibJab has raised a second round of funding; this $3m B round from previous investors Polaris Venture Partners makes more than $6m total the company has banked from investors. Credit for breaking the specific amount of funding goes to Dan Primack at PeHub, who is the man when it comes to digging up financial information.
$6 Million for Web Cartoons?
It might sound crazy, but today’s JibJab B round is just the latest chapter in an evolving story. Professional content production companies are getting funded left and right.
While this was supposed to be the beginning of the era of user generated video – the reality shaking out is more complicated than that. Specifically, advertisers are just not comfortable with the brand risk inherent in user generated content. That is changing slowly and it may continue to over time – but there’s likely to be a huge market for shops like JibJab long into the future. Likewise, video tools are now commodities and it’s all about the content you’ve got in your video service. Professional content is good, professional humor is great, say investors.
Witness the following, for example. Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die raised millions from Google backers Sequia and launched in April. Media analyst Jeff Jarvis invested in Black20, a small comedy video troup, in May. And venture funded ad sales network SpotRunner spent some of its VC money on funding its own original content creation company, 60frames. Ad networks creating their own content companies is something that’s liable to happen more than once. Finally, everyone from Michael Eisner to MySpace is now making original, serialized, short-form, soft-porn drivel. That’s the future – those adjectives right there.
Perhaps then at a time when Content is King again and bad content is making a princely effort of its own, we should be thankful that JibJab will be able now to double its capacity with this newest round of investment. JibJab might even be called relatively sophisticated – relative to most similar endeavors making money in online video these days. More than a blip in the news, the funding news is a highlight in one of the most important trends online.
