Metacafe

Metacafe is a video-sharing website that specializes in short-form video entertainment in the categories of movies, video games, sports, music and TV.

Metacafe, Inc.
Type of businessPrivate company
Type of site
Video hosting service
FoundedJuly 2003 (2003-07)
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
No. of locations(San Francisco, Los Angeles)
Area servedWorldwide
Key peopleReza Izad
URLwww.metacafe.com
Alexa rank 20,911 (July 2020)[1]
RegistrationOptional
(required to upload, comment on, rate, and review videos)
Current statusOnline

The company was headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in Los Angeles. Metacafe was acquired by the Collective Digital Services in 2012.

In its early years, Metacafe was similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but has since turned into a short-form video entertainment. The company's partners had included marquee content providers such as major movie studios, video game publishers, broadcast and cable TV networks, music labels and sports leagues.

The site is advertising supported, working closely with brands in the entertainment, consumer electronics, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods, food & beverage, and automotive sectors.

Company statistics

Metacafe used to attract more than 13 million unique monthly U.S. viewers and streams more than 53 million videos in the U.S. each month, according to comScore Video Metrix (March 2011). The site's global audience was more than 40 million unique monthly viewers.

History

Metacafe Inc. was founded in July 2003[2] in Tel Aviv by Israeli entrepreneurs Eyal Hertzog (Chief Technical Officer) and Arik Czerniak (CEO) and raised $3 million from Benchmark Capital. In June 2006, the company closed a Series B financing round of $12 million. Investors included Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital. That September, the company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California and in October, Metacafe was ranked the third largest video site in the world according to comScore.[3]

In 2007 Erick Hachenburg, previously an executive with Electronic Arts, took over as CEO of the company.[4]

In June 2012, it was reported that Metacafe had been acquired by digital talent agency, The Collective.[5] Although the terms of the deal were not released, the speculation suggested that the amount paid was significantly less than the total investment in Metacafe to date. Hachenburg left the company after the acquisition.

Producer rewards

In October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards[6] program in which video producers were paid for their original content. Through this program, any video that was viewed a minimum of 20,000 times, achieved a VideoRank rating of 3.00 or higher, and did not violate any copyrights or other Metacafe community standards was awarded $5 for every 1,000 U.S. views. Pay only for U.S. views.

The program had several success stories, some of which have been featured on national TV, such as The Can Tossing Video,[7] the Beer Launching Fridge on David Letterman, and the Ron Paul Girl series[8] by Liv Films,[9] that has been featured on Fox News and CNN.[10]

Metacafe has also teamed up with notable TV producers like Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law) with a series called Cafe Confidential, a 44 webisode series consisting of teens and twenty-somethings sharing semi-autobiographical stories. The short-form videos, shot close-up, were taken from interviews of more than 100 people talking about memorable moments.

By the end of 2008, Producer Rewards was considerably curtailed before being shut down completely due to a lack of demonstrable profitability. Once the Producer Rewards program closed, users like Kipkay switched their focus to YouTube.

gollark: Hardly.
gollark: Office Online?
gollark: You can only limit spying in 10.
gollark: Barely configurable, and keeps spying.
gollark: Er.

See also

Footnotes
  1. "Metacafe.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-03-27.
  2. Metacafe to be sold for USD 200 million Ynetnews. Retrieved January 9, 2012.
  3. We Try Harder, article from IPcommunications.tmcnet.com Archived February 3, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  4. Saul Hansell (10 October 2007). "Viral Videos Still Rule at Metacafe". Bits. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
  5. Atkinson, Chris (2012-06-17). "Pioneer Video Sharing Site Metacafe Acquired by YouTube Talent Agency, The Collective". Tubular Insights. Retrieved 2020-06-17.
  6. Metacafe - Producer Rewards
  7. Metacafe.com
  8. Livfilms.com Archived 2008-03-17 at the Wayback Machine
  9. Liv Films' Channel
  10. Livfilms.com Archived 2010-06-20 at the Wayback Machine

References
  • Bogatin, Donna. Interview with Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak on ZDnet Blogs
  • Gerson, Jen. Off the wall flips. From the Toronto Star. An article about a producer who has earned over $23,000 in Producer Rewards.
  • Holahan, Catherine. Don't I know you from the Internet? From Business Week
  • Marshall, Matt. Metacafe unveils producer awards, to underscore advantage over YouTube from Venture Beat
  • Richmond, Will. "Metacafe Drives Community-Based Programming Model." videonuze.com, Commentary from online video news blog VideoNuze published on December 6, 2007.
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