Metacafe

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Metacafe, Inc.
Metacafe Logo
Type Private
Founded July 2003; 21 years ago (2003-07)
Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States
No. of locations (San Francisco, Los Angeles,])
Area served Worldwide
Key people Reza Izad
Slogan(s) The Video Entertainment Engine
Website Metacafe.com
Alexa rank Decrease 1248 (March 2014)[1]
Type of site Video hosting service
Registration Optional
(required to upload, comment on, rate, and review videos)
Available in English
Current status Online

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

The company was headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in Los Angeles. Metacafe was acquired by the Collective Digital Services in 2012 and at this point Metacafe ceased to exist.

In its early years, Metacafe was similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but has since transformed itself 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.[citation needed]

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 but left in 2011 after being acquired by The Collective.[4]

In June 2012, it was reported that Metacafe had been acquired by digital talent agency, The Collective. 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.[citation needed]

Producer rewards

In October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards[5] 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,[6] the Beer Launching Fridge on David Letterman, and the Ron Paul Girl series[7] by Liv Films,[8] that has been featured on Fox News and CNN.[9]

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.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Metacafe to be sold for USD 200 million ynetnews.com. Retrieved January 9, 2012.
  3. ↑ We Try Harder, article from IPcommunications.tmcnet.com Archived February 3, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Metacafe - Producer Rewards
  6. ↑ Metacafe.com
  7. ↑ Livfilms.com
  8. ↑ Liv Films' Channel
  9. ↑ Livfilms.com

References

  • Bogatin, Donna. Interview with Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak on ZDnet Blogs
  • Gerson, Jen. Off the wall flips. From the Toronto Star[dead link]. 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.

External links

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