The Announcement with Will Ferrell, Adam McKay & Judd Apatow

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s video sharing site FunnyOrDie exploded over the summer with The Landlord, a one-joke short featuring Ferrell and a little girl with a dirty mouth. But the site has been widely criticized lately for failing to sustain the high levels of traffic delivered every time Ferrell is featured in a clip. A Hollywood Reporter piece last week pegged Landlord as both a blessing and a curse for the infant start-up: it attracted a huge amount of attention, but Ferrell and crew didn’t have enough quality content in the vault to keep visitors around, and though they’ve solicited successful contributions from stars such as Eva Longoria and Bill Murray, since there’s no compensation involved, no one with a Los Angeles mortgage to pay can afford to devote too much time to it. The conclusion: FunnyOrDie needs to pull from a wider talent pool in order to survive.

This week, they’ve expanded that talent pool with one key name, although whether or not it’ll solve Funny’s core problem is still debatable. In the clip above, Ferrell and McKay welcome Judd Apatow, writer/director of Knocked Up and producer of SuperBad. It’s a clever clip, clearly referencing if not the THR story specifically, then the general buzz that FunnyOrDie needs to become a money-making business, or die. But will Apatow, the busiest comedy producer in town, really prove to be a reliable fount of content?