The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

Metacafe is similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, A different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Producer Rewards. Its VideoRank system gauges viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers. Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and VideoRank score through its Producer Rewards Program.

The site features short-form videos in a variety of categories, including Animation, Comedy, Entertainment, How To, News and Events, People and Stories, Sports, Video Games and others. Original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.

History

Metacafe Inc. was founded in July 2003 in Tel Aviv by Israeli entrepreneurs Eyal Hertzog (CTO) and Arik Czerniak (CEO) and raised $3 million from Benchmark Capital. In June 2006, the company closed a Series B financing round of $12 million. Investors included Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital. The website's traffic increased rapidly, and by June 2006 it was ranked 128th by Alexa Traffic Ratings. That September, the company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California and in October, Metacafe was ranked the third largest video site in the world according to comScoreWe Try Harder, article from 1.

On February 5, 2007, Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts and Pogo, took over as CEO of the company. The company closed a Series C financing round of $30 million in August, 2007 with Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Metacafe struck a deal with internet phone service Skype to provide videos to Skype users to help spiff up their "mood messages", integrating with Skype's new beta version 3.5 for Windows. The site also integrated its video content with European mobile social platform Nareos and U.S. & Spanish mobile entertainment aggregator Zed, allowing supported users to stream or download selected videos to their handsets.

Producer rewards

In October 2006, Metacafe announced its Producer Rewards program in which video producers are paid for their original content. Through this program, any video that is viewed a minimum of 20,000 times, has achieved a VideoRank rating of 3.00 or higher, and does not violate any copyrights or other Metacafe community standards is awarded $5 for every 1,000 views.