Funny or Die was nothing. A simple website with no employees.
And then came The Landlord.
The video, which stars a dejected Will Ferrell getting evicted by a baby, spread like wildfire to every corner of the internet. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the web.
In a conversation with Wired’s Jason Tanz at the inaugural NExTWORK technology conference, Funny or Die president and CEO Dick Glover explained how that one video sparked a multi-million dollar business with legs in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, and New York City.
“Literally, when that video hit, there were no employees at the company,” said Glover. “The views got up to 30,000 an hour. They literally found two guys and said, ‘You’re Employee #1, you’re Employee #2’.”
Funny or Die quickly became the place to go for online comedy, marrying user-generated content with professionally created content and delivering it through a ‘Hot or Not’-style video platform. Glover’s business model is simple: keep production costs low, keep marketing costs lower, and distribute content widely through all appropriate media — especially social media. The average Funny or Die video costs $2,500 to make and gets 40,000 views. They create about 20-30 of these a month. Five of those videos will go viral, acquiring an average of 700,000 views and generating 10 times as much revenue as they cost to create.
Part of Funny or Die’s success can be contributed to its regular celebrity appearances, but that doesn’t seem to meld with the company’s ‘keep it cheap’ business strategy. Untrue, said Glover. Celebrities like Helen Mirren, Jack Black, and Charlie Sheen star in Funny of Die video for a myriad of reasons: to promote a movie, to revamp their image, or to support a cause. But it often comes down to creative freedom, which Funny or Die is delighted to offer.
“In Hollywood, creative freedom to do whatever you want is like a drug,” he said. Making a Funny or Die video “is risk-free. If it bombs, and nobody see it, there’s no downside. But there’s a huge upside.”
Another key piece of Funny or Die’s strategy is advertising, but not annoying, in-your-face ads that the young demographic so despises. “It’s not that young people don’t like advertising,” said Glover, “Young people don’t like bad advertising.”
The golden rule: whatever they do, it has to be funny.
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