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.

The original article in The Marker, and reiterated by Techcrunch, claims that the pair may have had conflicts with new CEO Hachenburg over the strategic direction of the company.

The Future Still Looks Good

The company still looks to be in good financial shape, having raised more than $45 million in funding rounds so far.

What makes Metacafe different from nearly all of it’s competitors is the focus on user generated content, which coupled with the revenue sharing scheme for content creators, makes it a good fit for producers.

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.

The funding also adds two new directors to Metacafe’s board and sees one of the company’s original founders, Arik Czerniak, step away from his day-to-day management duties. Czerniak will remain on the board as a strategic consultant, but is looking to pursue other endeavours full time.

With the new funding, Metacafe is striving to deliver a unique and leading online entertainment experience and is determined to differentiate itself from the likes of YouTube, Dailymotion and MySpace.

[Press Release]

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. 

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.

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

Could all this mean that Google might be moving towards becoming a full video search engine, as well as having its own library of videos form YouTube and Google Video?

If this is true then it spells bad news for video search engine start-ups like Clip Blast, Pure Video, Ulinkx, Blinkx, SearchforVideo and countless others.

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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.

But just because a site is busy does not mean that people necessarily like it more than a site which is less busy. But how could you see how much people actually like a site?

Use Del.icio.us to compare popularity

Well you could check how many times people have bookmarked all the pages from a site (not just the homepage) in Del.icio.us. People will only tend to bookmark something if they find it interesting.

It is pretty much impossible to find out how many Del.icio.us bookmarks a website has. You would have to search for every single page of that website in Del.icio.us and add then together all the bookmarks. Can you imagine doing that for a site like YouTube?

Well I thought of a way to cheat! That is by simply checking how many backlinks a website has from Delicious to the website in question. I did this by just using the following query in Yahoo:

linkdomain:youtube.com site:del.icio.us

That query returns 46,000 backlinks from Del.icio.us to pages on YouTube. Compare that to its competitor MetaCafe.com which only has 2,560 backlinks from Del.icio.us.

It is safe to say that the more backlinks from Del.icio.us, the more bookmarks in Del.icio.us, and hence the more people like the site.

I crunched some numbers and found that often the number of backlinks was 1/10th of the actual number Del.icio.us bookmarks (but that’s a very rough estimate). So now you have a very easy way to estimate Del.icio.us bookmarks by just multiplying the number of backlinks by 10.

To get an idea of how well a site is liked you also need to measure the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks against the traffic of a website. I’ve just simply compared it against Alexa Rank in the table below.

Popularity of ten video sites compared using Del.icio.us bookmarks and Alexa Traffic Rank:

• As you can see YouTube.com is immensely popular compared to its closest competitors MetaCafe and DailyMotion.
• Joost stands out as a website which is already proving popular compared to sites with similar traffic.
• Flurl.com stands out as a very busy site which few people actually bookmark, indicating people just visit in passing and it lacks a solid community.

I think the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks definately helps to point out the sites that have a more loyal community, compared to websites where people just visit it in passing.

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• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results:

It is is no surprize to see that YouTube is at the top, but it is particularly to see how closely tied DailyMotion.com and MetaCafe.com are.

Unfortunately Google Video, AOL Uncut, MySpace video or MSN soapbox could not be represented as Alexa does not give results for subdomains (e.g video.google.com), but just the main domain.

The growth of the top 5

The graph below compares the growth of the 5 most popular sites sitting at the video sharing table. The graph covers the past three years.

As you can see MetaCafe has not seen any growth for a number of months and meanwhile DailyMotion has shot up from behind to become a serious contender in the video sharing wars, most likely because it became a bit of a haven for pirated videos.

Am I missing out any of the big video sharing players here that have an Alexa rank higher than 50,000?

- Through File Sharing Pirate Videos have become very popular.
- If you read Photoshop tutorials it will help you learn how to use this program more efficiently.
- You might have to go with a P2P sharing software program that costs a little bit of money to find the videos you wanted.
- Learn about the search engine that searches the entire World Wide Web for the answers you are seeking.

Now we are also beginning to see the growth of video search engines that index video from a variety of sources. These video search engines are lagging behind the major video sharing sites, but will these search engines ever catch them up?

graph courtesy of alexa

YouTube.com

The leading website for sharing and watching online video clips. The company was recently sold for $1.77 billion to Google. It now ranks as the 4th busiest site on the internet and receives an estimated 20 million unique users per month, but it could be over 30 million by now. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005 and has seen huge growth since the middle of 2006.