Metacafe was a video sharing and gaming site launched in 2003 which was a full 2 years before YouTube yet even with a head start they were trounced and are no longer, having shut down in 2021. We used to play games at work on Metacafe and why I checked recently to see what happened to them.
In 2006 Metacafe paid it's content creators $5 for every 1000 US views if it achieved 20 000 views or more without breaking any copyright rules. This was a cash incentive to attract new video content and to some degree it did boost the numbers. The site was one of the first of it's kind around at that time with the peak being around 2011 with more than 40 million unique monthly viewers with 13 million coming from the US.
The site was sold in 2012 for a reported $200 million to The Collective a US based media company. Many believe the problem why Metacafe never took off like it should have done is because they were based in Israel and not the US and this hampered their growth.
In 2009 Google/YouTube had a 72% market hare of all videos streamed in the US. Today this market share fluctuates between 70% and 90% which are crazy numbers considering the advertising revenue being generated.
Metacafe was up against it from the very beginning if you compare the growth to YouTube who at launch were getting 5 million unique viewers every single day including a Nike advert featuring the Brazillian footballer Ronaldinho that had over 1 million views. YouTube was in a league of their own and being US based being the critical factor here.
In 2006 Google acquired YouTube for what was then a staggering fee of $1.65 billion which today seems like a genius move. Metacafe had already beena round for 3 years and the financial Venture Capitalist's backing Metacafe must have felt they had a chance. $200 million which is the figure they eventually sold for was more than 8 x less than that of YouTube plus 6 years later.
This story could have been so different especially when you consider Metacafe had a 2 year head start on YouTube. Being early does not always mean you are guaranteed of success and this is one prime example of this happening. Being early you have to make things happen and Metacafe having 40 million viewers over a 1 month period was never going to shock the world and set it on fire. In the same year of 2011 in comparison YouTube was seeing numbers like 3 billion videos being watched each day. In 2013 100 hours of video content was being uploaded every minute on YouTube and the writing was on the wall for Metacafe.
It does amaze me to think that some people are on the right track with their thinking and the implementation must have been what was wrong. Yes they were Israel based, but the growth was not instant like YouTube was and it did not catch on so they were definitely hampered by their mistakes.
If you have to think of internet search engines a company like Google was the 24th search engine to launch. Some of you may remember using the likes of Yahoo, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves before Google came on the scene and dominated that space very quickly. Again many of these search engines had up to a 5 year head start on Google and still failed.