Metacafe's Pay Scheme Goes Live
Back in my day we didn't get paid when someone watched our home videos. No, and we also had to walk uphill to school. Both ways. With boards nailed to our feet for shoes. But times have changed. These days, that endearing video you took of Aunt Irma breaking her clavicle while doing the funky chicken can earn you some serious cake.
To wit: Metacafe is going public today with its Producer Rewards program, which pays you $5 for every 1,000 views your videos get. Small print: Payment starts after 20,000 views ($100), and the video has to earn a minimum rating of three out of five stars. According to CEO Arik Czerniak, videos can get 20,000 views in just a few hours. Up until today, the Producer Rewards plan was only available on a limited basis.
Metacafe, you'll recall, is the current pretender to YouTube's throne. The site racked up about 535M page views in August, far outstripping every site but YouTube.
The video below has been viewed about about 1.3M times and earned its creators over $6,000.
Friday Night Madness - video powered by Metacafe
As Net users become more and more savvy about the value of their attention online, I'm confident the most fervent users will begin to expect renumeration like this. Pay schemes won't obviate for-free sites like YouTube though, especially since YouTube will have the copyrighted content that everybody digs. At any rate, it should be interesting to see what effect Producer Rewards will have on Metacafe's traffic vis-a-vis YouTube.
How about if viewers watch only part of the video? I watched about 20 secs of the one you've included before realizing it wasn't my kind of thing. Does it count as a "view" for purposes of payment at Metacafe?
Great blog, by the way. Great to be able to keep up by checking in with you.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard | November 03, 2006 at 12:42 AM