Q&A: Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg – how to get on the homepage

The CamcorderInfo.com Blog caught up with Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg for a few questions at last week’s CES in Las Vegas, Nev. Hachenburg discussed how Metacafe is a user-determined democracy for videos. The CEO also talked about what video creators can do to be featured on the homepage of the video-sharing site, and thereby, capitalizing on short video content.

 

CamcorderInfo: How does Metacafe cater to the end user? We spoke earlier with Metacafe founder Eyal Hertzog about advertising. What about someone who is a professional video maker?

 

Erick Hachenburg: Your end user? The producer?

 

CCI: Right.

 

EH: We are doing a number of different things. The most important thing, of course, that we do is if you are a producer, it’s fame and fortune, right? In the end, the producer cares about two things. They care about getting views, and they care about, eventually, how do [they] make some money to make some profit off of it in the future. 

Community Review Panel
Almost everything we do is centered [on] that…Our whole thing is “Video Entertainment, Powered By You.” What that means is that we actually have our panel of viewers that look at the content before it goes on the site. The way you get to our homepage is that the viewers are looking at the content. We look at the whole user experience. The video rank looks at everything [the viewers] do – how much they watch, whether they watch more than once, whether they send to a friend.  Based on that, we can find out very quickly, within 50 views, we can figure out if something is quality – determined by our audience. We can publish it on our homepage or get it recommended in our recommendation engine. That allows a producer whose content is good quality, entertaining, engaging, whatever quality means - we don’t make that assessment; our users do - you can get published to the homepage immediately. You don’t have to get 200,000 views before YouTube notices or someone like that. You can get there based on the first 50 views or something like that. 

 

We help producers get discovered because we curate the content. We’re going through all the content by our audiences and finding the stuff that should be promoted.  

Making Money
That of course, leads to an environment where you can monetize on it successfully. You have more selection over the content. With our Producer Rewards Program, everything is equal access. We don’t make decisions; our audience makes decisions. With the Producer Rewards, you, as a producer, decide “Do you want to participate?” You can submit to the site. You have to meet the requirements: it has to be your own content; it has to be appropriate content. If you do that and the viewers are enjoying it, getting to 20,000 views, you start making the $5 per 1,000 video streams. It’s a very open program for producers. The discovery engine is how you get your views – that’s the video rank, the community panel - and the Producer Rewards is how you can actually make money off your content. All of that is decided by our users, without us saying “Yes” or “No” or making some decisions editorially. We think that’s something very unique and special for our users.

 

CCI: So for producers, the way to make money, is to be the most popular? At least pass that 20,000 views?

 

EH: It’s not so much that you need to be the most popular. It’s how do you become the most popular based on the merit of what you do. 

 

If you read about many of the video-sharing sites that are out there, what oftentimes happens is that people are gaming the systems to try and [become] popular. Because we have video rank technology that looks at the whole user experience, it’s much more challenging to game it. The success is more your own.

 

We get rid of all the clutter. We get rid of duplicates. We get rid of all the inappropriate content and much of the pirated content. It becomes a much cleaner environment where you can have success. Finding success is much easier because of our focus on short form entertainment. It’s our focus, and the tools we use from our audience that makes it successful. 

CCI: What other ways can a producer help boost the success of a video? Does adding keywords help? Do general search engine optimization tools help push the video?

 

EH: They may help you outside of Metacafe, but inside of Metacafe, you don’t need to do that. I mean, you do need to tag well. We are looking at ways to help encourage the community to name better and tag better. That does help obviously to use appropriate tags. 

It’s hard to gain our system though. If you put up a really sexy thumbnail of something that’s not, our video rank is going to kill you. We don’t count the view unless you actually watched most of it, so you’ll get low numbers of views because of that. They will stop watching it, so their user experience will be very poor, and your video rank will be very low. So we actually never had a thumbnail problem. People didn’t put sexy thumbnails up unless they were relevant…If you try to mislead, you get a really low video rank and no visibility on our site. That is how the community is policing and promoting the content itself.   

 

CCI: It’s keeping them honest. Video rank is determined by what major factors? The number of views and ranking?

 

EH: The whole user experience, including how much of the video you watch, whether you sent it to a friend, whether you saved it or marked it as a favorite, things like that. 

 *