add site
services
publishers
database
health videos
toolbar
stats
live show
health store
more stuff
JOIN/LOGIN
| advertise add site services publishers database health videos
| | about toolbar stats live show health store more stuff JOIN/LOGIN |
Watch our videos on MetaCafe contourmd.com |
 Metacafe is a community based video sharing web site, that specializes in short-form original entertainment, where users upload, view and share video clips. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Metacafe is similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Wiki-editing of metadata. Its VideoRank system gauges viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers. The site features short-form videos in a variety of categories, including Animation, Comedy, Entertainment, How To, News and Events, People and Stories, Sports, Video Games and others. Original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.
[edit] HistoryMetacafe Inc. was founded in July 2002 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. The website's traffic increased rapidly, and by June 2006 it was ranked 128th by Alexa Traffic Ratings[1]. 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[2]. On February 5, 2007, Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts and Pogo, took over as CEO of the company. The company closed a Series C financing round of $30 million in August, 2007 with Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Metacafe struck a deal with internet phone service Skype to provide videos to Skype users to help spiff up their "mood messages", integrating with Skype's new beta version 3.5 for Windows. The site also integrated its video content with European mobile social platform Nareos and U.S. & Spanish mobile entertainment aggregator Zed, allowing supported users to stream or download selected videos to their handsets. [edit] Producer rewardsIn October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards[3] program in which video producers are paid for their original content. Through this program, any video that is viewed a minimum of 20,000 times, has achieved a VideoRank rating of 3.00 or higher, and does not violate any copyrights or other Metacafe community standards is awarded $5 for every 1,000 views. Pay only for U.S. views. (Less than 10% of the total views) As of December 2007, the top 10 producers on Metacafe had earned over $20,000 each[4], with the top producer, Kipkay, having earned over $117,000[5]. In total, more than 550 independent video creators have earned more than $1 million through the Producer Rewards program. The program had several success stories, some of which have been featured on national TV, such as The Can Tossing Video, the Beer Launching Fridge on David Letterman, and the Ron Paul Girl series by Liv Films[6], that has been featured on Fox News and CNN[7]. 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. [edit] WikicafeIn July 2008, Metacafe launched a beta version of its "Wikicafe"—a mass collaboration platform that enables viewers to edit video metadata. By ensuring that video titles, tags and descriptions are accurate, the community is helping to improve video search results. In August 2008, Wikicafe was opened up to anonymous edits, and this marked the point where Wikicafe comes out of beta, and becomes open to all. Together with opening Wikicafe to public edits, Metacafe has released 2 new features, Tag Focusing and Web Review, based on Wikicafe. [edit] Company statistics
Metacafe was ranked second behind MySpace in number of user comments per video posted in 2007. The "Metadata Metrics" report from AccuStream iMedia Research equated user comments with engagement. [edit] See also[edit] Notes
[edit] References
[edit] External links
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ↑ top of page ↑ | about thumbshots |
