metacafe

Metacafe is a video and media sharing community on the internet. Metacafe users upload and share thousands of new videos every day. Metacafe offers a desktop application, mainly targeted at users who are "video addicts" and download many of the videos every week. The desktop application is capable of downloading high-quality media to the local computer while the computer is idle.

Metacafe features user generated videos, funny videos, Internet videos (memes) and viral ads as well as sports and news-related media. Some of the other features on the site include flash games and sound clips.

History and usage

Metacafe Inc. was founded in July 2003 by Eyal Herzog (CTO), Arik Czerniak (CEO), and Ofer Adler (Board Member) after raising $4 million from Benchmark Capital and private investors.

In 2006, the website's traffic increased rapidly, and by June 2006 it was ranked 128th by Alexa Traffic Ratings. Metacafe provides over 450,000,000 videos every month, to almost two million registered visitors and 120 million visitors monthly, with 17 milion unique users each month.

In July 2006, a second financing round took place, and the company raised $15 million from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.

During late 2006 the company was about to be sold to an unknown company but due to decline in traffic the deal broke off.

Services

Metacafe users upload to the website's severs and share their videos. The videos are then distributed to a community of volunteer reviewers, checked by the company's reviewers to filter-out explicit images and mark some items with "adult" flags, and then distributed to all users by two main methods:

• Website Distribution - Showing the new videos and top videos and updating constantly. It is also possible to embed the clips into blogs and private pages.
• Client for Windows - A free downloadable application that enables the users to build and manage their own video library by optimizing their bandwidth to download and upload only when the computer is idle.

A viewer can call up a video, watch it, rate it and send it to his friends by email or Messenger. All ratings are stored and the site shows statistics for videos by the Highest Rank, Most Viewed, Most Discussed, and Most Recent. Additionally, the site shows a list of top submitters and top producers.

Metacafe's system is much better than most other video sharing sites in that the content on the website is first reviewed by special reviewers, and only then posted to the site. That way, non-quality videos simply don't get to the site. Also, Metacafe has a special anti-duplication algorithm, which eliminates any possibility of duplicated videos on the site. As such, every video is posted only once, which eases finding the videos.

Producer Rewards

^[1] In October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards program where users of this program are paid for their original content. Metacafe pays $5 for every 1,000 videos an item gets, after the first 20,000 views.

In the first two months of its run, Metacafe paid over $10,000 to five individual producers each, where the highest-paid producer received almost $25,000.

The program has proved to be a success, and is constantly generating numerous quality videos.

In October 2006, Metacafe was ranked the third largest video site in the world according to ComScore^[2].

Controversy

Metacafe has an anti-porn policy. However, it does allow rated-R content as defined by the Motion picture rating system. It has a family filter which is set to "on" by default.

Despite the family filter, many Metacafe users tend to add offensive comments to many videos. Sexual, racist or just plainly offensive comments tend not to be filtered out unless they receive a -3 rating by other users. These comments, however, do not appear if the Family Filter is turned on.

Linux users are now able to view videos at Metacafe since Adobe has released a native version 9 of Flash player.