The New York Times this morning had an article about Google. The title reads: “Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal.” The article goes on to explain that Seth MacFarlane, creator of the Family Guy series (the Simpsons-of-my-generation), will make 50 two-minute clips of a new animation series called “Cavalcade.” The cartoon will then be distributed by Google through the AdSense network with revenues being split up between Google, Seth MacFarlane, and the publishers.
If Google can figure out a way to pull this off and scale this, they won’t need to worry about the fact that YouTube isn’t making much money and that their head of monitization quit. There are a bunch of often mentioned reasons for why YouTube has struggled to monetize effectively, 1 of which I find really pertinent:
- User generated content creates risk for advertisers who want control over where their ads appear to prevent embarassing PR where their ad appears next to inappropriate material
These cartoon shows aren’t annoying injected video advertisements that no one wants to watch. No. People will actually want to watch these videos. This has the potential to give Google a platform for the syndication and distribution of HIGH QUALITY ORIGINAL web content that can monetize because it’s licensed content that people want to watch. Now when they ad on the contextual advertising and work in any behavioral data from YouTube preferences or other services, Google can literally sell advertisements against freshest/hottest new content that hits the web. Content creators will be vying to get their content pushed out, while advertisers will be vying to get their ads pushed around the highly sought after content.
It’s exciting. I look forward to seeing what they pull off.
July 2, 2008 at 12:28 am |
I was looking at that too. Two minutes sounds about right to me. That’s the low average I see in my stats. I’m already trying to figure out how to get them onto the site…