Working with Seth MacFarlane, creator of the “Family Guy” animated series, Google (GOOG) will in September begin distributing “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a series of digital shorts
to be embedded on Web sites as free, ad-supported streams.
About two minutes in length, the shorts–which MacFarlane describes as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier”–will be syndicated through Google’s AdSense advertising system, which will target them at MacFarlane-friendly segments of the Web. Some will be accompanied by standard pre- or post-roll ads, some by “brought to you by” tags, and others by original commercials created by MacFarlane.

The shorts are essentially like little Assisted Ad Delivery Devices, intelligently targeting advertisements at those receptive to viewing them. “We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”