Google Teams Up With Family Guy Creator

In a unique advertising move, Google and Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane are creating an ad-driven internet cartoon series, the New York Times reports. Using its AdSense service, Google will place two-minute animated "webisodes" of McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy on websites likely to draw the animator's target audience. Blended into the clips will be various ads.

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said an AdSense director. The budget for the series is in the millions, the highest ever for an internet series. As for McFarlane, it represents a chance to escape the “taste police”—the FCC—that restrict his television content. He calls the clips “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in the New Yorker—only edgier.” (More Seth MacFarlane stories.)