MetaCafe video sharing website and desktop app
Post YouTube, is Metacafe the Next Big Thing?
Now that Google has puchased YouTube, what’s an online video pundit to do? Talk to the next most popular site on the Web, I guess. Have you heard of Metacafe?
Metacafe the Web site was launched in May 2005 in Tel Aviv, seven months before Chad Hurley and Steve Chen flipped the switch in California on YouTube.com. The company has 85 employees and recently began moving its offices to the Bay Area. Metacafe also has $23 million in venture capital.
The site’s traffic stats, while nowhere near YouTube’s, are impressive, and Metacafe leads the pack of video-sharing sites vying for attention. According to comScore, Metacafe received about 525M page views in August, about 350M more than its closest contender, Dailymotion.
To borrow a Web 1.0 phrase, Metacafe is also very sticky. The site ranks third in average minutes per visitor (64.3), right behind YouTube (66.7). Both trail long-form TV destination Veoh (247.1). Metacafe is also third in average pages per visitor, with 41. YouTube has 65 and Veoh 68 according to comScore.
The amount of time spent on Metacafe is interesting. Readers who follow social networks may recall that Facebook was famously touted as the only social network where 93% of users returned every month, with most staying online all day long. Those usage stats were used, albeit briefly, to justify Facebook’s rumored asking price of $2 billion.
Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak doesn’t shy away from the comparison. “Metacafe is to YouTube like what Facebook is to MySpace,” he says.
But purists beware: Metacafe isn’t a pure video-sharing play. Rather, it’s something Czerniak dubs “a top entertainment destination,” a one-stop shop for sharing videos, games and ringtones.
Metacafe isn’t a purely Web-based creation either. The site has its genesis in a desktop application that was originally launched in 2003.
For a video to make it onto the site, it first goes through a quick but extensive filtering process, courtesy of volunteer editors using the desktop app. The editors’ ranking is then combined with what Czerniak calls a “behavioral ranking” — data culled from monitoring how users interact with clips on the desktop app.
According to Czerniak, the application is the key to Metacafe’s success.
“Metacafe was originally conceived as a desktop app,” says CEO Arik Czerniak, who says the app is for video-sharing power users who are addicted to video. “We have about 2 million dedicated users of the client [compared to 20M users of the site], and they consume about five to ten times as much video. The client generates a massive amount of usage data that you can’t get from just the Web…for instance, if someone replays a video ten times or deletes it without finishing the first view. So we use the client as a control group for video-ranking and grading.”
According to Czerniak, that filtering process ensures only high-quality videos make it to the site.
“How users vote [on other sites] is not a good proxy for quality,” he says, “because only two to three percent of people bother to vote.”
Metacafe’s behavioral ranking and filtering technology may also make the company attractive to content owners. Czerniak says Metacafe’s filters can determine when duplicate content is uploaded, even if the bit rate or length of the videos are different. Now that Google and YouTube are setting the bar by adding fingerprinting filters to their sites, Metacafe may be in a position to woo partners.
Czerniak says his site has some partnerships in the works, but of course he can’t reveal anything yet.
SummaryPersonally, I’m not sold on the desktop application. I understand its value to Metacafe, but I can’t see a generation trained on Web apps adopting a thin client. I’m also enamored of the idea that quality emerges through attention data, not explicit rankings, so I think Metacafe’s filtering process is an unnecessary impediment to rapid user adoption.
But the traffic stats say I’m wrong. Both Metacafe and Veoh (which has a different business model, but that’s another story) use desktop clients, and both sites are trouncing their closest competitors, which are mostly purely web-based. The exception is Dailymotion, a French site with a very broad reach outside the United States.
At any rate, keep an eye on Metacafe. They’re in the valley now. They’re coming for your eyeballs.
Original article is here