If today’s announcement that Google will launch Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s original web series across its network of AdSense sites sounds familiar that’s because the same parties made the exact same announcement last year. Someone, however, forgot to tell the New York Times, who managed to dust off the story, give it a fresh veneer and up the ante by quoting AdSense representative Kim Malone Scott as saying “We feel that we have recreated the mass media.”

Kim, you will never live that down.

No matter. I love what this deal represents, although I’m somewhat skeptical that users will adopt the model of clicking what has been defined as an advertisement in order to watch an advertisement in order to then watch a short blast of something MacFarlanely funny. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about proposed regulation of TV product placement disclosure that would have significant relevance for the growing web video business of advertiser sponsored, viral video campaigns.

The gist of the article is that the FCC is looking into requiring TV shows to include notices similar to what political candidates must say before or after campaign ads.

“You shouldn’t need a magnifying glass to know who’s pitching you,” said FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. “A crawl at the end of the show shrunk down so small the human eye can’t read it isn’t really in the spirit of the law.” Current rules require disclosure but allow it at the end of the show. (more…)

Let’s make a bet.

I’ll bet that by the time you’re halfway through watching the below video your commercial instinct will suggest that what you’re watching is a piece of marketing material. I’ll also bet that you’re going to keeping watching until the video is over. It’s that good. (more…)

I sincerely apologize if I offended anyone by using the word retarded in the title of this post, but get ready because I’m going to use it again. There’s no other way to express how ridiculous it is that the video site community is so far off in standardizing their metric for view counts. It’s straight up retarded and needs to be fixed.

Disparate video view count metrics is part of an overall problem of non-standard web analytics which ultimately stunts the economics of web content.

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