Uri Shinar is looking for a hit. But the CEO of animation website aniBoom (see earlier TechCrunch coverage here) thinks he can find one by creating a platform for talented, aspiring animators worldwide. A former Israeli-TV bigwig, Shinar is credited with helping to establish Israel’s No. 1 commercial TV station. Now he is trying to lay the foundations for a Web-based animation studio with aniBoom, and move it beyond the “YouTube-of-cartoons” pigeonhole it occupies today.
Shinar has produced quite a bit of television programming and along the way gained a hands-on appreciation for the cost, complexity and luck needed to develop and execute a financially lucrative success. This is why he sees the Web as the ideal incubator to form an animation studio driven by user contributions. On Monday, he is planning to announce an advisory board that includes John Mass (head of corporate development and new ventures at the William Morris Agency), Peter Hirshberg (chairman of Technorati), and Barbara Corday (the TV producer who created Cagney and Lacey).
Shinar is molding aniBoom with an eye towards the best that Web 2.0 has to offer when it comes to content creation, collaboration and production cost. But he wants to marry that with a more traditional pipeline for mainstream media distribution, including merchandising. I recently spent some time with Shinar, who explained to me that an animation studio such as aniBoom needs one big hit to get a snowball effect going. But these days hits can come from the most unexpected places. As he sees it, the hit aniBoom is hunting for is best exemplified by a frog, and no, it’s not Kermit…
A Goldmine Called “Crazy Frog”
The charming creature pictured at right is none other than Crazy Frog, aka, “The Annoying Thing”. Check out this video to get a taste of the frog and to hear the sound that launched an international merchandising bonanza, especially in Europe, Australia, and Japan. It is not an aniBoom animation, but it the type of content Shinar wants to help discover or produce.
When the worlds of animation, licensing, and merchandising collide, a big hit translates to big, big bucks. In this sense Crazy Frog embodies everything that aniBoom is striving for.
In 2005, the Crazy Frog franchise made over $79M through the sale of mobile ringtones alone. Now look at the cumulative merchandise sales estimates on the left and it becomes evident just how much money a single hit can generate. Do the math and ask yourself how many startups you can name that generate such sales figures? I bet many of you are scratching your heads real hard right now.
The crazy thing about crazy frog is that there was no master plan behind its making: In 1997, a Swedish teenager recorded himself impersonating a two-stroke engine and then uploaded the recording to the Web where it began spreading virally. In 2003, another Swede added the animation featuring the Crazy Frog character. A year later, a German company called Jamba! licensed both sound and animation and the phenomenon was scaled to a sensation.
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