Joss Whedon's Wacky Web Experiment

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Anyone's free to experiment on the Internet, of course, but now we're seeing a new type of grand-scale (and pretty wacky) experimentation.

Seth MacFarlane, for instance, cut a deal with Google AdSense to make a new animated series called Cavalcade that will appear in ad units spread around the Web on sites with a young male demographic (and also on YouTube, we've heard, so you won't have to scour the Web looking for every instance of the ads). Regarding the deal, Google (GOOG) bragged to The New York Times, "We feel that we have re-created the mass media." The upfront budget for the series was undisclosed, but is apparently "by far the largest amount spent on original Internet content to date," and revenues will be split between MacFarlane, the company selling the ads, Google, and the Web sites on which the ads appear.

Online Video: Show Me the Money

Rewarding your fans' obsessions is good business, especially online, where the true fanatics thrive. And Whedon is having a half-baked, creative, unregulated time of it. If he doesn't make a profit based on iTunes downloads and ad-supported streams, revenue from the Commentary! DVD might make up for it. But while DVD sales and rentals rose 1.6% in the first half of this year from the same six-month period the year before, DVD sales for the whole of 2007 famously dropped for the first time ever.

And to be clear, nobody thinks there's much money in online video, at least not yet. The best estimates put revenue from online video advertising at around $1 billion this year, and paid downloads at somewhat less than that. But iTunes is quickly ramping up sales and the folks at Google are wracking their brains trying to figure out how to make a dime back from YouTube. This is the way people watch content now, for better or worse, so there'd better be some money in it!

How the business side of things will turn out for Whedon remains to be seen, but the upside will undoubtedly be more advantageous for him and the rest of the team than it would have been if they'd funded and released a musical television special or movie. By rejecting traditional financing, ownership and distribution methods, Whedon wasn't constrained by other people's content windows, bottlenecks, and antiquated arrangements. And so he's able to meet his fans on his own terms.

Provided by GigaOm—