Metacafe is an online video sharing service that provides almost the same functions as YouTube, the Google product that is currently the leader in its category. Now, Metacafe was quite an anonymous service because the Mountain View-based company brought YouTube in the spotlights and conquered the Internet users' attention. Now, there is only one question: is Metacafe able to fight with YouTube? As far I can see, it is, but it urgently needs a powerful promotion campaign to prove there are numerous and even more powerful YouTube alternatives.

If you didn't know, Metacafe was founded in 2003 and has the headquarters in Palo Alto, CA and Tel Aviv, Israel. Although it was rarely promoted, Metacafe's numbers are quite impressive: “In 2006, the website's traffic increased rapidly, and by June 2006 it was ranked 128th by Alexa Traffic Ratings. Metacafe provides over 450,000,000 videos every month, to almost two million registered visitors and 120 million visitors monthly, with 17 million unique users each month. In July 2006, a second financing round took place, and the company raised $15 million from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners,” as it is mentioned on Wikipedia.

Go ahead, try Metacafe. You'll see that it provides all the YouTube features and even more than that, it manages to filter all the inappropriate content uploaded on its page. How? Using several filters that are marking a certain video with a “18+” sign, requiring users to enable the family filter. Among embedded clips, comments, tags, report video and many other functions, Metacafe displays one of the features that will be soon implemented on YouTube: pre-clip ads. This type of adverts allows the company to share revenues with the provider of the clips, boosting in the same time the number of the visitors.