Rumors are swirling that Metacafe, the third largest video-sharing site is for sale. The buyer of the site remains a mystery. Conventional wisdom is that it could be the freshly reorganized Yahoo who will purchase the site for a reported $200 million.
Eyal Herzog, Arik Czerniak, and Ofer Adler founded the Tel Aviv-based company in July 2003. Since the Metacafe launch the company has earned close to $20 million. Most of their earning came from venture capital groups Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.
Metacafe has a global audience of 17 million unique visitors viewing over 400 million videos a month according to comScore Media Metrix. The company is a competitor to YouTube and Google video.
Responses on the Metacafe sale to Yahoo have been mixed. On Techcrunch a poster with the name of Beatbox said,” Metacafe actually has a cooler interface than Youtube. Whether they are tracing Google or not, I think it will do well for Yahoo, especially if they can grab it for $200 million. They are still the most-visited homepage and I’m sure they would plaster it front and center.”
Another poster had a different view. “Let’s hope Yahoo doesn’t snap it up; that would suggest that all of their peanut butter memos and internal shuffling is just please-the-shareholder window dressing – not actually meaningful change.”
When an announcement will be made is not known. Until then there will be no shortage of speculation and rumor.
Mike is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
