Valleywag: Metacafe

YouTube blowing away competition as distribution platform

Jackson West — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:40:00 PDT

TubeMogul, a startup which allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites, did a survey of over 200,000 clips and how much traffic they garnered after 90 days. The results? The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092) than on the next eight video sites combined (2,092). [NewTeeVee]

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

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:40:00 PDT

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.

Metacafe founders take their $5 million and go

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:40:00 PDT

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."

YouTube starts paying losers for their clips

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:22:25 PST

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.

The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google's attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn "several thousand dollars per month," but those are few and far between. The real winner is Google, which continues to dominate the Internet video market, and now eliminates the small advantage held by rival upstarts Revver, VuMe, and Metacafe which have been touting their own loser-generated-content reward programs for some time.

Revver shares a million in revenue with video producers

Tim Faulkner — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:33:39 PDT

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?

Repeat after me: REVENUE IS NOT PROFIT. And Revver is competing in a sea of also-rans. VuMe and Metacafe also have producer reward programs, and DailyMotion and YouTube are about to launch their own programs. Lots of sites are about to start competing for the few uploads that will have money-making potential.

And it turns out that $1 million, impressive as it sounds, is not so great if you're a video producer, either. Since 25,000 producers have received some form of payout — making the average payout $40 total, as onlinevideoinsider points out in the comments — you are not talking about a living wage... more like a thank you for the traffic. Thousands more have not qualified for the minimum $20 payout yet. Success stories like Eepybird, the wacky "scientists" behind the Diet-Pepsi/Mentos videos, and Tim Street, producer of the salacious French maid TV, who are making a living wage from revenue-sharing are few and far between.

Until more producers can make more money from residuals, ad revenue sharing is just a gimmick. And until YouTube enters the game, Revver is just an experiment trying to reverse a year of bad news with a seemingly positive press release.

Funding an also-ran startup is expensive. ...

Owen Thomas — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:39:13 PDT

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]

Metacafe gets a little porny

Chris Mohney — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 07:20:57 PST

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.