JibJab Inks Ad-Revenue Sharing Partnership with Yahoo!

Is Santa really that low on cash?

While he may be depicted as such in the lastest online video spoof by JibJab Media, the animation makers have partnered with Yahoo in a Christmas season arrangement that has both parties thinking about the ad revenues to come from several million page views.

If the viewership of its next two video shorts — which, under the terms of the partnership, will be distributed over the Yahoo Portal — comes anywhere near the more than 80 million viewers drawn to “This Land” and “Good to be in DC!”, that payoff could be sizable.

JibJab’s next two animated shorts will appear exclusively on a Yahoo microsite. The first of which, “Grumpy Santa” went live on Yahoo on Thursday. The second, called “Inauguration Day,” featuring domestic and international leaders, will be appear online around January 17.

“Inauguration Day” will feature a video advertisement that will run on the media player before the launch of the animated short, in addition to the banner, skyscraper, and still frame ads that currently load off of the JibJab microsite and video player. Both Yahoo and JibJab see potential for lucrative product placement ads within the video content as well.

For JibJab, the chief benefit is advertising exposure to Yahoo’s millions of user, said Gregg Spridellis, the 33-year-old president and co-founder of JibJab Media.

“Our core competence is content creation. Teaming with a partner like Yahoo, which has the ad-based revenue model mastered, as well as millions of regular users, is great for our entertainment sales,” Spiridellis said.

The partnership affords Yahoo the opportunity to build out brand awareness with advertising-rich media across multiple channels of its portal, said Jim Moloshok, Yahoo’s SVP of entertainment, and content acquisitions and relationships.

“When JibJab released ‘This Land’ in July, they had to partner with AtomShockwave because their server couldn’t handle the volume of traffic they were getting,” Moloshok said. “And the second video they released with them did almost as well. So clearly these guys are not a roman candle phenomenon.”

With the addition of “This Land,” the number of monthly unique visitors to AtomShockwave’s site jumped from 3 million to 17 million in July, according to AtomShockwave spokesperson, Elisa Greene. With “Good to Be in DC!”, traffic to the company’s site doubled from 4.5 million in September to 9 million in October, the month of the clip’s release.

Brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis founded JibJab Media in 1999.