WhoTube?

Metacafe has now definitely now conceded defeat to YouTube when it comes to UGC. And with good reason, as YouTube is THE site for anyone looking to upload a video they’ve shot and want to share with the world. YouTube has become ubiquitous.

However, that doesn’t mean Metacafe has failed, or that it’s destined to die a horrible death in the same manner as Joost did. Instead, it needs to adapt and evolve. Which is exactly what it’s already done, and is continuing to do.

Go211 and Beyond

Instead of trying to be the ubiquitous video site for all, Metacafe is now focusing on a particular demographic and building vertical content to cater to those users.

In May the site launched Metacafe Movies a vertical channel dedicated to curated content related to the movie industry. This includes uncensored movie trailers and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage.

Metacafe’s other verticals are Video Games, Television, Music, and Sports. The Sports channel is the focus of Metacafe’s most recent acquisition, with Action Sports, the parent company of Go211.com, joining the fray.

Go211 attracts around 4.5 million visitors every month thanks to its live Webcasts and highlights reels of actions sports events around the world. These visitors will now be added to the 45 million monthly uniques Metacafe gets worldwide.

Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg told The Wall Street Journal:

“The big news for us is that we are really focusing on how to go deep in several channels. Instead of trying to be a broadcast network, we asked how do you build more meaningful verticals. We are of the belief that every content site is going to be reinvented as a video site.”

He also implied that other similar acquisitions could be in the offing soon, but wouldn’t name names at this stage.

Conclusions

I must admit to not having heard much about Metacafe over the past year or so. But the company seems to have been quietly building some momentum after bravely changing its overall strategy. And it looks as though it’s now on course to succeed.

Metacafe Survey

Every single piece of analysis conducted over the last few years has suggested online video is growing, and in a supremely fast and aggressive manner. And a new survey on behalf of Metacafe continues this trend.

Regular Viewing Habits

Viewing online video has become a strong, regular occurrence for many people. 13 percent of respondents watch every day, with 50 percent watching every week. 60 percent watch every month, with 76 percent of those questioned watching online video at all. All of these figures are up from 2009.

Of the 50 percent who watch online video every week, the average time spent doing so is 4.6 hours, which equates to around 40 minutes per day. This increase in the occurrence and time spent watching online video is unsurprisingly being driven by the young.

Online Video Vs. TV

38 percent of those questioned are interested or very interested in connecting their computer to a TV in order to view online video on a big screen. Which is good news for the forthcoming connected TV platforms such as Google TV and YouView.

However, interestingly these same people state that online video isn’t, on the whole, interfering with their regular viewing on broadcast TV. Which is good news for the big networks which seem to be getting increasingly worried about their market being tempered by the growth of online video.

I think it will eventually happen, but maybe not as soon as we had thought it would.

Online Video Advertising

As the move to the Web does take place, advertising is likely to increase. But video sites have to be careful not to go over the top.

The Metacafe survey suggests that most people are currently happy with the level of online video ads, but it wouldn’t take much for this situation to change. I don’t think viewers ever want to see TV levels of ads being played before, during, and after online video content.

Conclusions

The online video sector is obviously is a healthy state at the moment, and only likely to get even healthier.

[Via NewTeeVee]

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.

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.