SAN FRANCISCO, 9:23 PM, SUN JUL 6 | 0 POSTS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS | tips@valleywag.com | RSS
Posts Tagged “

Metacafe

online advertising

How to make an easy $1,000 -- sell your Twitter background

Despite investment from Jeff Bezos, Twitter still has no revenue model. Doesn't mean you can't earn money with your Twitter account, though. To prove it, CEO of interactive agency Deep Focus Ian Schafer auctioned off a sponsorship of his account. Video-sharing site Metacafe won the rights with a $1,082.01 bid. Now where most of Twitters users keep a pretty picture of San Francisco's skyline or their favorite shady spot, Schafer's got a tiled background featuring Metacafe's logo and slogan. How much should you charge for your space? Schafer's got 577 followers, so the going rate should probably be around $1.87 per follower — which means the price is going up.

jackpot

Metacafe founders take their $5 million and go

Metacafe cofounders Arik Czerniak and Ofer Adler — neither involved with the company's day-to-day operations — will walk away from the company with $2.5 million each, according to TheMarker. If $5 million seems like a lot, remember that YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each cleared $326.2 million selling out to Google and that Czerniak and Adler might have turned down a $200 million to $700 million offer from Yahoo. All of which makes it even more fun to watch the video embedded below, recorded just weeks after Google purchased YouTube, where Czerniak tries to convince Bambi Francisco that Metacafe is "the largest, most popular video site." More »

online video

YouTube starts paying losers for their clips


It's not that people object to Google making money on YouTube, really. They just want their cut. Yesterday, YouTube opened a program which pays a portion of ad revenue to content creators to all comers. Well, all comers from the U.S. and Canada whom YouTube deems acceptable, that is. Rather than specifying who it will accept, YouTube suggests you keep applying if you've been rejected. That worked so well with Susie in the 8th grade, after all. More »

online video

Revver shares a million in revenue with video producers

Online video platform Revver announced it has paid out $1 million dollars to video producers from its ad revenue sharing program, just in time for its one year anniversary. That puts Revver's total revenue at around $2-$2.5 million, since it splits fees 50/50 after paying 20% to a distributor. Sounds great. But it doesn't prove that Revver has a sustainable, profitable model—not after the year it's had, losing key staff, being banned from MySpace, losing LonelyGirl15 and several other notable video producers like Ze Frank and Ask A Ninja, and a rumored buyout. Why? More »

Funding an also-ran startup is expensive. Online-video site Metacafe just raised $30 million, bringing its total to $50 million; YouTube, by contrast, only required $11.5 million in venture capital before selling to Google for $1.65 billion. [VentureBeat]

video

Metacafe gets a little porny

A reader points out that video sharing site Metacafe — fresh from fruitless acquisition negotiations with Yahoo and bringing in a new CEO — seems to be showcasing more racy videos on the homepage. The "highest rated" clips often contain a scattering of cheesecake softporn or topless amateur video, and many are little more than slideshows advertising for nekkid sites (such as "Beach Girl Video"). All of which happily scroll by despite the ostensible "family filter" in place. Definitely one of the 25 startups to watch.