Spiridellis Gabs About JibJab’s Success

Interesting story by way of Tropist about how Gregg Spiridellis, one of the founders of JibJab about creating a viable content providing brand. It’s a great, lengthy pieced from Blog Critics, a transcription from his appearance at the Branff World Television Festival, wherein Spiridellis talks about the ups and downs of creating the popular site, from their pre-dot-com-bust foundations to their rebirth and overnight success in 2004. Even if you don’t particularly care for the particular content they’re slinging, it’s a terrific bit of information about the workings of an online venture that, thus far, has made a real go of this whole internet hooplah. Here’s some :

Working in Los Angeles, the brothers are confronted by the reality of a system of agents, managers, executives, and lawyers that was designed long before anyone thought of the Internet, never mind creating video content for it.

“It’s so hard to get anything done,” Spiridellis complains. “The whole system was created to produce a small number of really big investment productions, but with the web you’ve got to be able to produce a very big number of small productions.”

“One of the problems we’re trying to solve is how do we scale our production, because I can’t make a production for a few thousand bucks if it’s going to cost me five thousand to deal with the lawyers and everybody else.”

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