Metacafe Appoints New CEO
Metacafe today announced that it has appointed a new CEO.
Erick Hachenburg, who led casual-games leader Pogo.com before assuming responsibility for Electronic Art’s global online strategy.
Arik Czerniak, co-founder and former CEO, will remain on the executive management team to focus on strategic product issues and partnerships. I interviewed Czerniak for a recent article for The Daily Reel. Very often a founder will hold onto a company long after it has outgrown his entrepreneurial skillsets, so Czerniak’s passing of the reigns is an interesting one.
One could argue the company is establishing a new CEO to make itself more marketable for sale. Metacafe recently announced a U.S. headquarters and expanded executive team. Alternatively, as BloggingStocks predicts, this could ice rumors of Yahoo acquiring Metacafe.
Metacafe is the largest independent online-video site — attracting a global audience of more than 17 million unique viewers consuming 550 million page views every month (comScore, December 2006).
Cool.
I’ve uploaded my videos to some 20 or 30 sites. I have a lot of experience uploading video. Of those sites, Metacafe and MySpace are the top two worst sites to upload to. Whether using Firefox, Opera, Camino or Safari, the upload experience is the same: lousy. THEN, I don’t like the interfaces once my videos are uploaded. PLUS, I don’t like the policies and practices of the sites. Did I mention I don’t like MySpace and Metacafe? I don’t like them very much. To tell you the truth, I don’t like Metacafe or MySpace at all. Not the tiniest bit. Not even a little bit. You guessed that, right?
Metacafe is a nifty site.. I only like it for the instructional videos that are usually up… how I learned to make an old webcam into an infrared camera.. Metacafe also does this producer rewards thing, where if your videos are original and not stolen, and if they get over 20,000 views, you can get money for them.. which is most likely why metacafe has a ton of users.. still love youtube though 🙂
I went to meta to watch those super bowl commercials and their ads drove me crazy – all that flashing, annoying, and I couldn’t get off one of the pages unless I agreed to install some crappy spyware or just close the browser, very frustrating, I hope this new guy fixes that. Some good stuff, but the place is really buggy.
Metacafe seems to be moderated by the same clubhouse mentality 17 year-olds that ran eefoof into the ground.
I love metacafe, you can make a load of money off that site, but you have to really be good. I love how you get 100 to 200 views without advertising your stuff.
ok what am I missing here with the e-mail addresses posted by Name?
Jischinger,
May I ask where you are located? We do not support any type of spyware, and definitely don’t have any type of anything that you would need to download in order to watch videos (other than the latest version of Flash, but that’s not Metacafe, it’s just the flash player).
This may be a problem (that I haven’t yet heard of), so I’d like to know more about it so we can take care of it. If you can either post it here or (better yet) on our forums, I would really appreciate it. http://forums.metacafe.com.
Sorry to use your blog for this, Nalts. And thanks. 🙂
Looks like we’ve got our own Vergangenheitsbew going here.
whoa someoen is watcing, yikes! interesting. I will try to recreate what took place on your site. It wasn’t trying to instal anything for meta, it was an ad on the right side and when I tried to back page out it kept popping up and wouldn’t let me leave until I hit ok and then still couldn’t get out. I can’t remember what the name of the ad was, think it started with a D. Then I ran my special program to clean the reg, so I don’t think there’s anything left of it on my HD. But for the sake of research and cause I think Nalts likes you guys, I will try to find it again and post the info on your forum. Sorry for the response here.
metacafe is full of spyware & hacker tools,and they will cancel your account when you sign a contract! beware!
cancel what account???
I am fed up to my chin with front office administrators who haven’t a clue what the back room techies in their company are doing. They (administrators) say “This is how our site works: it does this, this and this.”
But it doesn’t, didn’t and often won’t. And a definite skew can be perceived. De-finite.
GooTube Cafe. It has a nice ring to it.
HI Jischinger,
If you are in France and you are talking about something that happened a few weeks ago, we found out about it and removed the ad from our site. We don’t support any type of spyware, so if something accidentally does get through, we remove it (once we are aware of it).
As for cancelling accounts, we don’t do that at all, actually. Reject videos from Producer Rewards – yes.
(And Anonymous – just in case you meant I am an office administrator, I’m not – I know what’s going on in the back room – I”m there with them. 🙂 )
‘Name’ Is gunna get alot of spam…
I have made a quite a few dollars on there, the thing is it does seem to be moderated by airheaded teens and there inane comments. they need to rethink what constitutes a good video and make a fairer ratings system.
Hi Davideo,
What would you suggest for a fairer rating system? Every other site uses a star system for ratings, just like we do. What would you do improve it?
I’m being serious, not mean or anything. 🙂 I’d rather you’d say it on our forums instead of on Nalts’ blog, but whatever you’d like. Also, I’m pretty sure you have my email address already.
The impression I got was that each submitted video was rated by a panel of gatekeepers before the video is released to the public. Is that not so? And if so, who else does that?
eefoof had volunteer moderators around the world who could log in to the site administratively and decide whose videos were good enough. i didn’t care to have my videos judged by MadV or some kid who thought copyright infringement was a joke.
Metacafe has over 100,000 reviewers from all over the world, but they only give a video its initial rank. They don’t decide what is posted or not. At most, they report something as being inappropriate, but they don’t have the power to remove anything.
Anyone can be a reviewer, but they’re only about initial viewing of the videos, not deciding what gets posted (which is almost anything but porn, illegal activities, racist videos, and those types of things).
Any video flagged by reviewers passes through us for a final decision.
“If you are in France and you are talking about something that happened a few weeks ago, we found out about it and removed the ad from our site. We don’t support any type of spyware, so if something accidentally does get through, we remove it (once we are aware of it).”
Not in France, but I’m willing to go if need be. The spyware was this past Monday, Super Bowl ads. If you are looking for people to sift through uploaded videos, let me know what you pay, I’m pretty good at that 🙂
LOL – you don’t need to go to France. We did have an ad that had gone through by accident, but we had removed it at the time.
I know the Superbowl ads page, so I don’t know what spyware you’re talking about, but we’re in different countries so I wouldn’t. I have passed it on to our sales department, though, so they will try to locate it and have it removed (a bit hard since we don’t have a name, though). Thanks. 🙂
As for the reviewers, they are volunteers from all over the world. Feel free to join if you’d like – I envy those who have time to watch videos all day long. As opposed to what some may think, we don’t get paid to watch videos at work all day.
Okay, yeah, we do.
Not really. 🙂
People who volunteer to be the arbiters of good and bad video (without the ability to create even mediocre video themselves) are called ‘trolls’ at YouTube.
Well, considering they only give an initial rank and they don’t have the ability to have a video removed or anything, I don’t really agree, but why don’t you become a reviewer, have your friends become reviewers, and change the way things are?
Talia, how/where do you sign up?
Link Please.
garbage
motion.tv/dino1991
You just need to download the application from metacafe.com. In the application, on the left, there is a button that says “customize channels” and at the bottom is a checkbox where you say you would like to receive unrated items.
Have fun!
Talia- really commend you for getting onto this post and addressing issues directly. That’s a sign of understanding new media.
Thanks, Nalts. We’re all about new media. 🙂
Your reviewers are illiterate and puerile.
Metacafe sucks. They will reject your video when it is time to pay producer rewards.
Hi Tom,
That’s not true – we’ve had tons of videos accepted into the program. I suggest that before anyone submits a video they read our FAQs to see what the rules are – the videos are always rejected on those grounds – we don’t have any hidden rules. Most videos that are rejected are for copyright reasons.
Good luck with your other videos, though.
It’s not reigns, it’s reins, as in, passing the horse’s reins to someone so they can take control of your direction and speed. A reign is something a king has (does). Nothing personal. Just thought you might like to know.
thats not good
I agree w/ the poster, that of all the sites to upload to metacafe is by far the most frustrating.
something ALWAYS goes wrong. I’ve never had it be smooth once. Just now I thought, what the heck, I’ll try it again. I pasted the youtube link. that never works. I tried uploading the 36 meg .mov file — right format, right size, says file’s unrecognizable.
Also their obsession w/ duplicates –so annoying! someone always (apparently) uploads our files before we do, so they won’t let us upload on our own site.
I upload to vimeo, daily motion, youtube – no problems ever — only metacafe is so asinine and frustrating.