| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | July 2002 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| No. of locations | (San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv) |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Erick Hachenburg, CEO Eyal Hertzog, Founder and CCO Eran Pilovsky, CFO Ziv Kabaretti, VP Product Brent Fraser, VP Sales Michelle Cox, VP Marketing and Sales Development Steven Horn, VP Programming and Content |
| Industry | Online video entertainment |
| Slogan | The Video Entertainment Engine |
| Website | Metacafe.com |
| Registration | Optional (required to upload, comment on, rate, and review videos) |
| Available in | English |
| Current status | Active |
Metacafe is a web site that specializes in short-form video entertainment in the categories of movies, video games, sports, music and TV.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
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 site with several differences. The site now showcases curated, exclusive and original premium entertainment-related video content.
The company's partners include 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.
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Metacafe attracts 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 is more than 40 million unique monthly viewers.
As of September 2011 its Alexa global rank was 336th.[1]
Metacafe Inc. was founded in July 2002 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.[2] The company is currently headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
On February 5, 2007, Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts and Pogo, took over as CEO of the company. The company closed a Series C financing round of $30 million in August, 2007 with Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
In October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards[3] 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,[4] the Beer Launching Fridge on David Letterman, and the Ron Paul Girl series[5] by Liv Films,[6] that has been featured on Fox News and CNN.[7]
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.
Numerous third-party web sites, applications and browser plug-ins allow users to download Metacafe videos.