VentureBeat

Aniboom has closed a $10 million second round of funding to expand its online cartoon network.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures both led the round. Existing investor Evergreen Venture Partners also participated. The company runs an animation portal where independent animators can contribute their own animated shorts. It also has distribution deals with a variety of mobile operators and web sites where viewers can watch the animations.

The company is riding high on the popularity of animations for adults, which have spread from Japan’s “anime” comics to a worldwide audience. Beyond hosting animations, Aniboom has built a community around its videos. Fans can rate the videos, share them, and the artists can enter a variety of contests, such as who can do the best animation based on American Idol or Radiohead. Aniboom lets creators keep 25-30 percent of the profits from advertising for its videos, encouraging them to keep active.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company has raised $14.5 million to date. It will use the money to expand its animations for both the web and mobile platforms and create original animated shows for TV. In May, Aniboom said its animations could reach more than 360 million people through partnerships with web sites such as Metacafe and mobile entertainment companies such as Jamster. At that time, we said that Aniboom was closing its round. Aniboom also recently said it would make animations for mobile games produced by I-Play.

Aniboom said it now has a network of more than 5,000 independent creators from more than 70 countries around the world, and features thousands of movies on its site.

Online animations network Aniboom is seeing a real boom in demand for the animations its independent animators are creating. The Israeli company is announcing today that it has five new outlets for its online animations and has added a half-dozen mobile TV partners — all of whom will expose 360 million viewers to Aniboom’s videos.

We wrote about Aniboom last year when it was just getting off the ground with its web site that let animators upload their self-made videos.  Now it has more than 5,000 animators from 72 countries who have contributed more than 6,000 videos, says CEO Uri Shinar.

“It’s like YouTube for animations,” Shinar said in an interview. “Though it’s more professional.”

The adult animations market, which has long been popular in Japan, has now spread worldwide, extending the U.S. and other foreign animation markets to more than just cartoons for kids. (See our previous Aniboom coverage).

Aniboom actually has its own active channel on YouTube. The Animboom animations there get two million views per month. Some of its hits so far include Jungle Jail and Animal Nation. Aniboom’s videos will reach an additional 140 million viewers through the new web site partners being announced today, including Dailymotion, Metacafe, Veoh Networks, blip.TV, and blinkx.

For mobile, Aniboom is teaming up with mobile entertainment distributors including Buongiorno SpA, Cellfish, Jamster, Player X Overseas, MobiTV, and Thumbplay Stateside. Those networks have more than 200 million users.

Beyond hosting animations, Aniboom has built a community around its videos. Fans can rate the videos, share them, and the artists can enter a variety of contests, such as who can do the best animation based on American Idol or Radiohead. Aniboom lets creators keep 25-30 percent of the profits from advertising for its videos, encouraging them to keep active.

Shinar also said that Aniboom has now become a test bed for new TV shows based on its animations. Some Aniboom animation series could theoretically make the leap to Comedy Central and MTV, he said. Testing videos on Aniboom is a lot less risky than commissioning a TV show that may or may not be popular.

Aniboom has 32 employees in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. In January, 2007, the company raised $4.5 million at a valuation of $17 million. It’s now in the process of closing on $10 million in additional capital.

YouTube may have captured the largest video audience, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of niches to exploit. AniBoom is tapping into an impassioned community of video animators to create content that will, occasionally, capture some of that YouTube-sized audience.

A competitor for the video award at tomorrow’s Crunchies, AniBoom is different from most other video sites in one important respect: Almost all of its content was created by members, whereas video sites like YouTube are famed for having content ripped off from other sources.

AniBoom, by comparison, even has its own software tool, Shapeshifter, that can be used to make professional-quality animations. For fun, it also has the recently created Micro-Smotion tool, which can add simple animated tidbits to regular video. The site says it is growing rapidly in popularity.

Like other sites, most of the existing content is stuff you wouldn’t want to bother watching. However, AniBoom is counting on the star factor — from any large group of people, several exceptional individuals are bound to come forth.

AniBoom’s CEO, Uri Shinar, likes to compare the possibilities of his site by referencing Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who were unknown talents making short clips until a Fox executive groomed them, leading to the hit cartoon South Park. AniBoom attempts to replicate this success in its Creator’s Series, although none that we saw had gotten more than a few thousand views.

However, the South Park comparison is apt in more than one way. The Stone and Parker creation that led Fox to contact them was a quirky student animation of Jesus killing a deranged snowman. Many of the videos on AniBoom are similarly odd. One of my personal favorites: “Rabbit: Terror of the Wood,” a series of very short clips about a desperately horny rabbit.

The site also runs contests offering cash prizes, which seem to attract quite a few submissions, proving that the world’s junior animators are eager for both fame and money.

Although there are other animation sites around, like Crunchyroll (coverage here), AniBoom is one of the only sites encouraging indie content. Another is MyToons, which just launched.

AniBoom is located in Israel. The site took $4.5 million from Evergreen back in the beginning of 2007.

And, in the interest of wasting a bit of time, here are a few (somewhat work-safe) videos: