Forbes Magazine has an interview with the Funnyordie.com's founders.
Here are a couple of highlights.
I'm sure there's something to the instantaneous piece of it too. This stuff doesn't have to sit in development for years.
Absolutely. You just go do it. Grab a video camera and do it. You don't even write a script; you just get the beats for it and do two takes, three takes at the most. And because of that, some of them aren't going to be great, and some are. But the whole spirit of it is, Who cares, let's just do stuff and have fun with it.
Do you see a trend emerging? Will other celebrities start to make their way online too?
Yeah. And I hope they do it in this way, kind of messing around and loose. I think if celebrities start entering it with a team of professionals, agents and executives, and the Internet short becomes really thought out, I think instantly people will smell that out. So I think the spirit of it has to be sort of screwing around, to be real and not overly premeditated. If you want to see that, you go to big movies or television--and that's a great thing, but the Internet has a looser form to it.
It's surprising few celebrities have gone down this path, but we can obviously expect hundreds of films to be hitting the pipes in the next few months, to compete directly with user-created content. Celebrities clearly have the name recognition advantage and a fan base, but can they be as creative as everyday folk and can they generate more than one hit?Again, it's another example of doing more stuff, for less money and experimenting to see what sticks.
