Metacafe was once the hottest video sharing site, and although it’s growth has seemed to falter over the past year, it still boasted 28 million unique visitors during March.

But that hasn’t stopped the service’s founders, Arik Czerniak and Ofer Adler, from leaving the company, and cashing in their shares to the tune of $5 million on their way out of the door.

No Longer CEO

Czerniak had already stepped down as CEO of the company in February 2007, just months after the company was reportedly offered to interested buyers for between $200 and $300 million.

Now, according to Israeli newspaper The Marker, both he and fellow founder Adler have left the company for good. Between them the pair are thought to have held only 5% of the company’s shares.

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Two new investors have sunk an additional $30 million in online video site Metacafe. Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures join several existing investors in the site, which attracts 25 million unique visitors each month.

The cash will be used to fund global growth and to expand the depth of content available through the site’s Producer Rewards program and through partnerships with well known media companies.

Richard de Silva of Highland Capital said:

Metacafe is defining the next generation of online video, moving away from simple video sharing and hosting to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience for short-form content. Its sophisticated approach to audience-driven programming is unique in the industry.

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Metacafe has just launched their new Facebook application. Metacafe is the 3rd largest video site in the world, and this new application will only add to its popularity.

Facebook users can now search through all the videos on Metacafe, see what is popular, both in your network, and on Metacafe itself, share videos with friends, and leave comments.

This application also makes use of MetaCafe’s new user channels feature, which allows anyone to create, update and promote their very own video channels on Metacafe. 

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Skype 3.5 for Windows was released to the public a few days ago, and to coincide with this upgrade, Skype and Dailymotion, an online video community have partnered together.

This new version of Skype adds videos from the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Metacafe to Skype and will establish an exclusive channel. This will allow Skype users to share videos from Dailymotion’s Mood Channels.

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Much like the situation in many schools the Pentagon decided to ban a variety of sites from the military including Metacafe, YouTube, iFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, Photobucket MySpace, BlackPlanet , MTV and more.

YouTube has now challenged the ban and is now working with the Pentagon to encourage them to remove the block.

YouTube’s CEO Chad Hurley said:

"They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the problem is."

I just noticed that Google is integrating video thumbnails into its regular search results. It is doing this for video clips from select sites (pictured above).

Video sites that seem to get a thumbnail are:

• Yahoo Video
• MetaCafe
• YouTube
• Google Video
• MySpace
• Vimeo

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MetaCafe will be taking a similar approach to advertising as YouTube by inserting static text-based adverts within video clips on its website.

MetaCafe has partnered with Adap.tv to provide these adverts. Adap.tv is a new online video advertising platform that has just launched publically. The company allows publishers and advertisers to match relevant advertising with online video content.

Adap.tv’s partnership with MetaCafe is very substantial given that MetaCafe is one of the leading video sharing sites and has an estimated 20 million visitors a month.

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