Metacafe takes the user experience very seriously; it offers quality videos and a dedicated review system that keeps content up to high standards. This is why we chose Metacafe as the “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” winner.
Metacafe is now based in California, but it was actually started in Tel Aviv, Israel. Despite beginning outside of the United States, it has created a huge following in America, not to mention most other English-speaking countries.
The appeal of Metacafe is the carefully cultivated content. If YouTube is a smorgasbord of videos, Metacafe is a carefully planned but extensive banquet. Metacafe takes pride in the fact that videos are carefully reviewed by a panel of 80,000 community members. While you might be inclined to think that this limits content and creativity, it actually works to keep the Metacafe site clean and orderly.
One of the biggest advantages of this system is the lack of duplicates. Possibly the worst parts about YouTube is finding 23 variations of a video you are searching for and not knowing which is exactly what you want, not to mention the varying quality of copies. All these duplicates end up making Youtube feel cluttered.
Metacafe on the other hand is well-organized and offers nearly as many videos, in all sorts of categories. There are daily recommendations of the most popular videos as well as a thriving community that comments on the videos and rates them.
Part of the reason Metacafe is so popular is because it was one of the first sites to pay people for posting videos. The Producer Rewards system rewards videos that bring in the most viewers. Once 20,000 people have viewed your video, Metacafe will pay you $5 for every 1,000 views. With some of the most popular videos getting millions of views, this system has proved to be quite lucrative for many people.
It’s exactly this kind of thought-out design that makes Metacafe so good. The content is great and easy to find, the community is strong and you could end up making good money. Metacafe is truly an incredible innovation in the Internet Age.
If you are looking for ways to make your own videos, check out our rankings of the best camcorders and the best multimedia cell phones.
Because the videos go through an approval process and a ranking system, the videos in each category really are worth your time. You don’t have to wade through a lot of flotsam to find what you are looking for. And the highest ranked videos on the home page are updated more frequently than many other video sharing sites, making it easier to find highly-rated videos easily.
When you select a video, the viewing pane offers a nice variety of options, aside from the standard play, pause, fullscreen and volume controls. You have easily accessible options for sharing the video or embedding it on a separate site. You also have the options of adding the video to your favorites playlist or bookmarking it for later viewing.
The search function in Metacafe is extremely easy to use, making it possible to search by category or other criteria. If you need to do an advanced search, however, the process is not that simple. First you must have the Metacafe application installed on your computer. Then you can access the advanced search through a menu. Why can’t Metacafe simply put a link titled “Advanced Search” next to the primary search box like other sites do? It’s a small problem that won’t affect most users, though.
Like all video share sites, the titles and descriptions on the videos are user submitted. This means that the information can run from vague tidbits to way too much information, but for the most part, the titles are useful.
If you have an account on Metacafe, and are signed in, you can also rate the video yourself and write comments. This feature is an essential part of the Metacafe community and the video review system. User ratings are taken into account when ranking the best videos.
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