Metacafe Movies trailers – A Return to Web 1.0?

in News Opinions by Yohay Elam — May 28, 2010 at 1:51 pm | 2 comments

Metacafe, one of the world’s largest video sharing sites, launched a new section for movie trailers, that will include existing trailers in addition to restricted trailers, behind the scenes clips and even 3-D showcases. The interesting news about this new destination mini-site is its editing.

Metacafe will dedicate 3-5 workers for packaging and presenting the videos in order to have a unique dynamic and voice. The editors will also be responsible for editing a guide for the big movies expected this summer.

This mini-site is not the only vertical that Metacafe has. Hubs for music, sports and TV already exist. Such curated sections work as destination sites: movie fans are expected to return to the site and see what’s new. This launch comes on top of Metacafe’s addition of premium British content (Mr. Bean, FATV, etc.)

Metacafe already saw a leap of 70% from movie related advertising in the past year, and Hollywood’s potential is huge.

Old style editing – is it that bad?

The Web 2.0 era saw the rise of collective wisdom or crowd-sourcing to surface the best content to the top. Users submitted content and other users voted for or against this content. Supposedly, it wasn’t a small bunch of editors that were calling the shots and telling people what to read and see, but the masses who got control of content.

Three and a half years past since Time Magazine chose You as the person of the year, with an image of a YouTube movie on the cover. While the crowd-sourcing model is great, it doesn’t work for everyone.

Time’s cover said: “Yes you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world”. Many people want to expand their knowledge and consume content in specific niche areas, but their activity ends there. Only a small fraction of readers care to vote / tweet / share content. Submitting to sites? Creating new content? You’ll need a magnifying glass to sort them out from the masses.

So, while movie fans, Swiss history addicts or art-deco enthusiasts have content accessible, they’re activity mostly ends in accessing the content, and not shaping it. Many of them want experts or more active enthusiasts to curate the content for them.

In the case of video sharing sites such as Metacafe, there’s a benefit for advertisers as well as for movie fans. Advertisers will be confident that the content is “safe”, targeted and carefully selected. This tight packaging pays off much better than user generated content. UGC still exists on the site, but the real cash cows are found in these mini-sites.

Here’s the video that came with the launch:

Disclosure: I used to work for Metacafe.

Website: http://www.metacafe.com/
Abstract: Metacafe specialize in short-form original content - from new, emerging talents and established Hollywood heavyweights alike. Since 2003 Metacafe has been one of the top independent online video...  
Read more about metacafe in The Wadi Index.

Tags: featured metacafe Metacfe UGC web 2.0

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Author: YohayElam

Yohay Elam is a problogger, with Forex Crunch being his primary site. Yohay belongs to the founding generation of Israeli political group blog Black Labor, a writer in the The Networking Blog and maintains his personal bi-lingual blog. Before becoming a problogger, Yohay worked as a programmer in various Israeli startups such as Metacafe.