It’s no doubt when it comes to social media and web video, YouTube takes the cake. Currently within top 5 Alexa rank and also owned by the #1 search engine and website online, YouTube has everything backing it. Google doesn’t control the monopoly though, there are so many cool video streaming services out there each with their own to offer.
Metacafe has shown substantial promise and growth since it’s initial launch in 2003. I’ve been a fan of the site for a while, and ever since they released features to help video publishers make money with original content I’ve loved the site. It’s a brilliant business concept and it’s grown on very quickly.
Attracting well over 40 million uniques each month, clearly Metacafe is a force to be reckoned with in the streaming video world. There are other competitor sites such as MegaVideo and Vimeo, but each has their own rewards and benefits as a video service.
What makes Metacafe Different?
From their About Page, Metacafe isn’t just a normal video streaming service. They are controlled by the users, for the users, and all of their content is voted on and shared by their userbase.
The Metacafe experience is determined entirely by our community. Videos are user-generated, user-selected, user-reviewed and user-rewarded. At Metacafe, we put the audience in the driver’s seat, empowering viewers in a much more meaningful way than other video sites… A community review panel of more than 80,000 volunteers takes a first look at each of the thousands of videos submitted to the site every day.
The way the web is evolving, it’s only intelligent to allow your website’s users to control the content they see as popular. With social news site’s such as Digg and Reddit where users vote up articles, what makes web video any different? Metacafe has been online for a while with some brilliant ideas, and they’ve got a decent head-up on some features which YouTube just can’t compete.
Metacafe also has a section for developers and webmasters, basic webmaster tools. Although there isn’t an official API for development yet, you can set up RSS feeds to automatically parse through submissions in applications. Metacafe has a very bright future ahead of itself, and if development continues as it has over the past 7 years I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of Metacafe in the near future.
