Good for a laugh, not a buck: campaign cartoon got exposure but no revenue for brothers' site.

BY most measures, the animated spoof "This Land" is acolossal success.

The two-minute online feature in which President Bush and Sen. John Kerry hurl insults at each other to the tune of "This Land is Your Land" has become an almost ubiquitous element of the 2004 campaign--and that unexpected attention has landed its creators, brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, on three network morning news shows and on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

But their success story is not making its way the bottom line, at least not yet. While the parody has led to a trickle of advertising for their Web site JibJab.com, Evan acknowledged, paraphrasing a line from a less well-known Woody Guthrie song, that "we ain't got the dough-re-mi."

"This has not been a money-making endeavor," explained Evan, 30, a graduate of the Parsons School of Design. "People assume that all this exposure equals money, but I can assure you that's just not the case."

Plus, there is now some legal trouble for Their Internet company, JibJab Media Inc. Turns out that Ludlow Music Inc., which holds the copyright to Pete Seeger's recording "This Land Is Your Land," wasn't happy to hear the 1940 Guthrie classic used without permission or compensation. Ludlow sent a letter on July 23 demanding that "This Land" be pulled from the JibJab.com site.

Little payout

For the Spiridellises, who formed their Santa Monica Web design firm in New York five years ago, the experience is turning into an object lesson on the economics of the Interact.

Beyond advertising, there remains little way of rewarding most content providers--or keeping those who pay for content from disseminating it to those who don't. Had the duo recorded a novelty song that was released on CD and played on the radio, for example, they would receive a piece of the retail sales.

"Why the hell put all this time and energy into making something if you're not going to get any type of payoff?" asked Greg Stuart, president of the Internet Advertising Bureau, a non-profit trade group. "By the time it becomes hot you can't go to advertisers and say: 'Look what we've got.' By then it's too late."

The bureau projects that $8.5 billion will be spent on Interact advertising in the United States this year, up from $7.2 billion in 2003. He said most of that goes to well-established sites that can produce detailed demographic information.

"They can say they have gotten 35 million hits, but to an advertiser that does not mean much," said Stuart. "They want to know: Were they adults 18 to 49? How many men? How many women?"

The Spiridellises might bave been forewarned

Icebox.com, a highly, regarded site that drew talent from the ranks of successful television comedy writers, was forced to pull the plug because of high overhead and little revenue.

After some of the founding members acquired the assets at a bankruptcy auction, the site was re-launched with sharply lower overhead and a focus on making distribution deals.

Tal Vigderson, managing director of Icebox 2.0 LLC, said the site now operates on a pay-per-view basis, charging 25 cents for each three-minute clip. He said more than 50,000 of those clips have been sold over the past two years and plans to turn it rote a free site by the end of the month. The future revenue stream, he said, will come from supplying content to an emerging generation of wireless phones with video capabilities.

"There is not a lot of money to be made on the Internet," said Vigderson, who is also an entertainment attorney.

Like many Internet pioneers, the Spiridellises came from other fields. Evan worked as a graphic designer and Gregg, now 33, was an investment banker. In 1999, they decided to leverage Gregg's business acumen and Evan's design skills and started Jib Jab as a developer of animated and graphic content for Web sites.

Hoping to produce for films and television, the pair moved to Los Angeles in early 2002 and worked on campaigns for units of Kraft Foods Inc. and Sony Corp. They also collaborated on a children's book "Are You Grumpy, Santa?" published by Hyperion Books, a unit of Wall Disney Co., in September 2003.

Watching the partisan sniping that has become a feature of presidential election years, the brothers said they wanted to create a satirical statement on the parties. They wound up spending eight weeks and "hundreds and hundreds of hours" making "This Land." (Gregg wrote the words and Evan created the images.)

"It was something we did to have some fun with the election," said Evan, who like his bother declined to indicate a political preference. "We put it up on our Web on a Friday (July 9) and on Sunday Fox News did a little report on it. The next day we started getting e-mails arm media inquiries."

Evan declined to say what the site generates in revenues other than it throws off enough cash to pay the rent on their 800-square-foot Santa Monica office. They have no staff and are joined at work each day by their dogs.

The inability to cash in on "This Land" may prove an advantage in the Spiridellises" legal battle witb Ludlow, according to Fred yon Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group for content providers.

"If someone is accusing them of exploiting copyrighted material for profit, they should know these guys didn't make enough money to cover the bandwidth," said von Lohmann, who is representing JibJab.com pro bono.

He has filed a "defensive suit" in San Francisco court asserting that "This Land" is a parody that does not represent copyright infringement and is seeking court costs from Ludlow.

Paul LiCalsi, Ludlow's lawyer at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP in New York, confirmed that he had sent the cease and desist letter but declined further comment.

Dismissing the legal wrangling as little more than a nuisance, the two brothers seem to be enjoying their ride of celebrity--non-lucrative as it might be.

"I'm not saying it's fair or unfair, that's just the way it is with the Internet," said Greg Spiridellis. "We're taking a long-term view."