Metacafe from Best YouTube Alternative

A complete YouTube alternative for some, this video hosting primary was not about challenging the top dogs, but becoming one as the niche was just starting to grow. Two Israeli founders created Metacafe in 2003, two years before the YouTube itself. As many other services of the same niche, it started off with a sole purpose of entertaining and communication between creators and the community. Successful fundraising campaigns allowed the newly-formed company to move the HQ to Palo Alto, the realm of innovation and wild startups.

As Dailymotion and YouTube joined the party and the competition became very strong, the founding fathers of Metacafe accepted a vision of redesigning the whole purpose of the service and steering the development to another direction. This switched Metacafe to shorter clips and videos, which were mainly used for advertising or entertainment. Clips were not as short as Vine’s but brief enough to make people who were interested in such format and length flock to the service.

Metacafe once was a good place for making a profit out of the videos as Producer rewards system was introduced. If the video got 20,000 views, the service would pay a specific sum of money for the next thousand. The program was ceased due to many people wanting to make money, producing content that was lacking quality and questionable profitability of their innovation. This move forced many people to switch the platform and join YouTube, simply because the reward for the quality content had to be in place, as many of the creators quit their jobs to work on the videos.

Metacafe is a place for watching and uploading videos, sharing comments with the help of Facebook, and generally having fun while dealing with more brief clips and photo galleries.

Let us know what you think about the Metacafe!