Funny Or Die Celebrates its First Birthday, Can Pearl say Hangover?
April 22nd, 2008
I was recently asked if Funny or Die is irrelevant. It’s an interesting question, especially in light of the site’s one-year birthday last week. The answer I came up with was yes.
Don’t get me wrong, we owe a debt to Funny or Die because of the impact it’s had on online video in the last year. In that sense it will always be relevant.
It blazed the trail for premium-talent web originals. Will Ferrell’s The Landlord was a huge hit by any metric, but its legacy may be as the single most important video in the new wave of celebrity-driven scripted web content, not the clip that launches a successful destination site. It opened the door for celebrities to participate in their own web originals, but it hasn’t proven the model for a niche video site.
I’d go so far as to say that the success of The Landlord was partly to blame for the writer’s strike. Creatives assumed that they could launch their own companies around a single piece of content and sought to empower themselves to follow suit through direct digital distribution, bypassing the studios. Self empowerment feels good until the bill shows up.
Funny or Die was the first site built around A-List Hollywood content. But first mover advantage doesn’t mean much for online. Friendster launched social networking and now it’s still kind of big…in the Phillipines. It’s not about doing it first, it’s about doing it best.
To be fair, Funny or Die is more than a platform for video comedy, it’s also a brand, with offshoots of the “or Die” variety incrementally expanding the network. But for the time being, it’s still a hit-driven brand, with traffic spikes coming when one of its clips goes viral.
It’s also a destination site in an increasingly hyper-distribution trending world. Which means it depends on traffic acquisition and maintaining content exclusivity. Two tough things to do in today’s web.
So how long will Sequoia, CAA and the other backers allow Funny or Die to burn cash? They just raised $15 million, a decent warchest to weather the upcoming nuclear winter. But Youtube is the undisputed category killer for video and covers much of FOD’s short-form UGC comedic content. The video site market is contracting. Bandwidth costs plus 30 employees means Judd Apatow needs to make a lot of movies to spend ad dollars on Will’s site. Most importantly, Funny or Die’s traffic has been declining since its launch. How many more birthdays before the party is over?
If I were a betting man, I’d say as long as Will Ferrell is interested in supporting FOD then the project will live. There’s no way that CAA lets a talent’s pet project go away unless things get really bad. The problem is that I think that the bloom is off the rose and the party is over.
Tags: caa, comedy, funny or die, pearl, sequioa, the landlord, traffic, will ferrell
Posted by: jake Posted in BusinessYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
[...] or content, but all the noise about whether or not FunnyorDie has a real digital business, or as I argued, is irrelevant as a web property, is made moot by today’s [...]