Tycoons Row

Company Background

A company who has a global backend infrastructure based in Israel and California, over $20 million in venture capital funding between Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, and boasts 400 million videos & 16 million unique visitors is another video-sharing service that provides social networking features. Metacafe, started in 2004, has a ranking technology (VideoRank) which filters the most “entertaining” videos.

Strategic Philosophy

The strategic philosophy at Metacafe is to provide a platform to showcase the quality content that is presented on MetaCafe and provide a means for users to produce quality content. This is evident based on Metacafes revenue-sharing model called Producer Rewards. This reward model allows a user to create quality video and get paid for it. Metacafe will license the video Digg today is to differentiate itself from other user-generated content sites through innovative features and giving the user community improved ways to track, gain awareness and share their content with other users and the world to see. A perfect example of this is that Digg has podcasts that are able to be digged, ranked and shared. Another feature is Digg Labs which gives you a real-time, interactive view of stories that are submitted.

Mission:

Metacafe aims to be the worlds largest online video broadcaster of quality videos. With the capital funding they have received, their focus should be to provide more features for broadcasters and additional rewards programs aimed at distributing quality content.

Vision:

Metacafes vision should be to specialize in data mining features to showcase the best user-generated. Currently, they have the VideoRank Technology. However,

According to Comscore reports, last year, Metacafes dropped heavily in traffic. Techcrunch reported those results and about a potential acquisition by Yahoo this past December.

One issue I see with this service is that currently that videos don’t have general categories in which they can be placed. You can tag the videos, however, with over 400 million videos, all you can get ranked on is 1.) Most discussed, 2.) Most Viewed, 3.) Most Recent.