Metacafe is a media and video 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, humor 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 Israeli Eyal Hertzog (CTO), Arik Czerniak (CEO), and Ofer Adler (Board Member) after raising $4 million from Benchmark Capital and private investors. On February 5, 2007, Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts and Pogo, took over as CEO of the company.

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 over 19 million 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.

Services

Metacafe users upload to the website's servers 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 such that the content on the website is first reviewed by special reviewers, and only then posted to the site. Using this system, non-quality videos don't make it on 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 videos.

Producer Rewards

October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards program where users of this program are paid for their original content. If the video has a rating of 3.00 or higher Metacafe pays $5 for every 1,000 views 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 $26,000.

As of May, 2007, Producer Rewards has over 1,000 videos in the program, with the top producer having earned over $40,000. Metacafe's Producer Rewards has proven to be the best paying website in the world, easily passing other sites that pay based on ad revenue (a vague term that cannot be checked by the average user). Producer Rewards pays solely on a pay-per-view basis.

The program has proved to be a success, and is constantly generating numerous quality videos, some of which have been featured on national TV, such as the Beer Launching Fridge on Jay Leno.

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

Controversy

Metacafe has an anti-porn policy even though there is an adult category. 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.