http://www.beet.tv/2009/05/jibjabs-founders-on-evolving-the-business-model-for-digital-entertainment.html
Monday, May 04, 2009
Scott Kirsner here... long-time fan of Beet.TV, first-time guest blogger. Like Andy, I've been following the evolution of online video as an incredibly powerful new distribution channel for content, writing in the Boston Globe, Variety, the NY Times, and on my own blog, CinemaTech.
I've spent the past 18 months talking to content creators about how they are navigating this new landscape, where video has suddenly become free to create and distribute. If you're a talented filmmaker, documentarian, animator, or vlogger, how do you actually earn a living in this incredibly noisy environment?
In a book that has just been published, I collect interviews with 30 of the creative innovators who've been trying to answer that question: people like "What the Buck" star Michael Buckley, the animators behind "Homestar Runner" and "Red vs. Blue," and documentarians like Robert Greenwald, who's now working on a project about the war in Afghanistan and releasing parts of it on YouTube before it's complete. The book is called Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.
Two of the people who've been pioneering this new kind of audience-building (and testing new business models) are Gregg and Evan Spiridellis of JibJab Media, founded a decade ago. In particular, they were early in their attempts to make ad-supported content work, and then moving away from advertising toward a subscription-based business model.
I asked Andy if he'd bring back a video he shot with Gregg Spiridellis (he's the business-oriented sibling, while Evan oversees creative) to accompany an exclusive excerpt from the book. (The video was originally published on Beet.TV last June.)
* * *
Gregg Spiridellis: At first, we thought that advertising would be the way we’d go. But the more we look