Metacafe is an online video sharing site with a very good image quality that specializes in entertaining viewers of all ages with its videos, short films, video games, sports, music and TV. It was founded by Israeli businessmen Eyal Hertzog as Technical Director and Arik Czerniak as Managing Director in July 2002. The company’s headquarters were located in San Francisco, California. Its branches are located in Los Angeles, New York, London and Tel Aviv. Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Highland Capital Partners are some of the privately owned Metacafe investors, which are major content contributors, for example major movie studios, broadcast and cable networks, video game publishers, music labels and sports leagues.
Since its inception, Metacafe has been gaining popularity day by day with the number of viewers increasing every day and it was also undergoing many changes. In 2006 it was ranked 128th by the Alexa ranking in June and the third largest video site in the world in October according to comScore. The company’s headquarters also moved from San Francisco California to Palo Alto, California in September of the same year. Later, in 2007, Erick Hachenburg became the CEO of the company.
Metacafe attracts around 13 million viewers and streams around 53 million users in the US alone each month. Metacafe’s monthly audience is around 40 million exclusive viewers around the world.
Metacafe used to be like other video sharing sites, but now it has morphed with more short-term entertainment movies. The site has also experienced many differences and features only short entertainment videos. Metacafe has now been transformed as a site that supports the advertising of various brands such as entertainment, telecommunications, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage and automotive sectors. Therefore, most of the short films seen on Metacafe are advertising the products of these brands.
In 2006, Metacafe started a video rewards program that further popularized the site. In this program, whoever uploads a new and original video and if the video was viewed 20,000 times and achieved a rating of 3 without violating the copyright terms and conditions, that video uploader will be paid $ 5 per 1000 viewers. However, this bounty program was applicable to US views and had many success stories, but at the end of 2008 it came to an end because it was not proving very profitable for the company and viewers switched to other sites to share videos that offered a similar type of reward. programs.