Metacafe – Youtube’s Arrival?

I found out about Metacafe.com from a CNN’s article about 25 new startups to watch. I immediately visited Metacafe to search for new video on Bosnia and found a useful, fairly unique video for my site.
And this company offers something Youtube has not yet done: paying the authors for their works.

The auteurs get $100 after 20,000 viewings and $5 for every 1,000 subsequent views. Since September, Metacafe has paid a total of $250,000 to 200 contributors.

Wait! There is more. Metacafe even has an affiliate program which pays blog/site publishers to host a customized Metacafe player. Read what Metacafe says about its affiliate program:

You can become an affiliate partner of Metacafe simply by hosting a Metacafe video player on your site. The video player can be customized to fit the interests of your audience so that each day your visitors can watch fresh, high quality and engaging videos without ever leaving your site.

This sounds like a good idea, but Metacafe doesn’t have many videos to make this model effective. Those who publish unpopular topics won’t be benefited this method as there are few or even no video to customize for the player.

I’m anxious to know if the business model will succeed. I recommended Eefoof for those who want to make extra money from their creative works. However, I think Eefoof will sink due to its mediocre GUI and low quality submissions. I also suggested MSN’s Soapbox, which is currently available as beta version and does not include any monetizing program. On the other hand, Metacafe has a professional user-interface and sounds much more promising. It might not beat Youtube but can be a mighty competitor.

I will watch this company very carefully. Stay tuned.

[via cnn]

Why You Should Switch To or At Least Try MSN’s Soapbox

If you receive one of those emails asking you to try Soapbox Beta, you should.

And here is why?

1. Be an early adopter – The early birds get all the worms and the early adopters enjoy all the fun.
2. Share the ads’ revenue - Currently there is no ad. But expect to see a lot of contextual ads in the future. I bet I will be MSN’s own Adsense. Do you think MSN develops Soapbox just for fun? Google bought YouTube to exploit this website’s huge traffic for their Adsense/AdWords market. Sooner or later, MSN will use Soapbox as one of their advertising media for their Adsense to compete with Google. (I heard about MSN Adsense for a few months now but don’t know anything about its public availability.) Recently, Youtube announced its plan to share the advertising revenue with video content creators, owners and publishers. As the late commer and challenger, Soapbox has to the same if not more to compete for users and top users. Not convinced? How about Jason Calacanis offered to pay top Diggers to ditch Digg and jumboat to Netscape.
3. Uploading - Actually I didn’t tried out SoapBox because of reason #2. I’ve been annoyed for the past few days because I couln’t upload a video of type .mpg on youtube.

Some minor grievance about Soapbox

• It loads a bit slow compared to Youtube.
• The Menu bar on the left side is not very intuitive.

Uh, by the way, this is not a paid review by MSN. I like trying out new stuffs and ideas not yet popular with the mainstream as well as ocassionally admire Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates. I hope my last mention won’t get my blog attacked by other Interneters.

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Technorati Tags: Bohemian Biz, Social Sharing, Youtube, Soapbox