Who Needs Adsense? 'Cavalcade' Blows Up on YouTube

So it’s September 10th and Seth MacFarlane’s long anticipated 50-episode animated series, Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, has hit the web today. The Burger King-backed series has been talked up quite a bit for using Google Adsense to push the show out to its target young male demo, but finally we get to see some actual meat if you will.

There might be a few lucky ones who managed to happen upon the characters butting onto the ad space of their favorite sites. But apparently most did not. Unless you count YouTube as one of those sites. The videos have been on fire today, with the two episodes out (“A Dog on $25,000 Pyramid” and “Super Mario Rescues the Princess”) netting over 500k views each so far from YouTubers.

Perhaps it was the tacky auto-play feature of the embeddable player at sethcomedy.com, but YouTube is the clear winner here. Oh, and lead sponsor Burger King of course. They along for the ride either way. And let’s not forget that YouTube is a Google property now, and so we’re really just talking semantics here.

Liz Miller caught up with showrunner MacFarlane and even got him to admit there may be more Cavalcade in store after the first 50 have their run for the next ten weeks. Let’s wait to see the next 48 before we get to excited about that. The cut-away joke joke format so integral to Family Guy is pretty much what Cavalcade is. Only now they almost seem to run on longer than the joke actually merits. “Super Mario” ticks up over 2 minutes, when probably a minute would have shored up the laugh. “A Dog on $25,000 Pyramid” is tighter, but lacks payoff – the sarcastic middle-aged man as a dog bit is pretty worked out in the FG world.