We are now showcasing Director’s Cut videos on Bebo, one of the largest social networks with over 24 million monthly unique visitors (comScore March 2008). We’ve created four different channels for each category of the Director’s Cut, so go check them out!

Director’s Cut Animation - http://www.bebo.com/metacafeanimation
Director’s Cut Action - http://www.bebo.com/metacafeaction
Director’s Cut Comedy - http://www.bebo.com/metacafecomedy
Director’s Cut Documentaries - http://www.bebo.com/metacafedoc

If you have an account on Bebo, make sure to become a “fan” of your favorite channel. If you don’t have an account, now would be a good time to create one!

If you haven’t noticed yet, Metacafe is sporting a new look this spring. Here’s a brief lowdown of the updates we’ve made:

• New design: A new, cleaner design to make it easier for you to access the best, freshest, videos on Metacafe.

• What’s Popular Now: Check back on the home page every hour to see videos that are popular now, according to what you and your fellow 30 million viewers are watching, talking about, rating, sending to their friends, Digg-ing, embedding on their Facebook profiles (the list really goes on and on).

• Updated subscription box: The My Subscriptions box has a new home on the right side of the page – and now displays up to 5 channels at a time. If you’re doing a little spring sprucing up yourself, now’s a great time to add to your Metacafe “must see” list with new channel subscriptions.

Share your opinion about the new design by taking our forum poll or leaving a message in the forum.

More to come in the following months – so stay tuned…

This April Fool’s Day, be the first to have the last laugh! Visit our Metacafe April Fools channel and send one of our hilarious prank videos to your friends. Act fast, or you may be the fool first!

Playing a prank has never been this easy –

Think you can do better? Submit a video of a prank, someone getting pranked, or how to set up the mother of all pranks. The best ones will be featured in the April Fools channel.

Hey punk, you feeling lucky????

Here’s the deal, we have a video here about our Leap (Don’t Look) Day challenge that explains it all, but for you muttonheads that need an extra definition, here’s how it goes.

We’re sick and tired of the whole world ignoring Leap Year… treating it like the ugly cousin that the rest of the family is ashamed of….so we at Metacafe want to make something out of it.

LeapYear '08

How? You ask? Well, submit your crazy video creations for the official Metacafe Leap (Don’t Look) Day and we’ll feature them on Metacafe on February 29.

Are you creative, or what?

Make sure you tag your videos “LeapYear08” so we know it’s for our Leap (Don’t Look) Day extravaganza.

So check out my video, and tell your friends about this. You do have friends, don’t you?

Yours truly

Metacafe King

To all those producers affected by yesterday’s changes to the Producer Rewards® program, first let us say that we appreciate all your concerns and are more than willing to address them. If you have questions or specific issues, you are welcome to contact our Customer Support team through the Contact Us form in the Help Center or go on the Metacafe Forums.

Regarding your concerns over the removal of videos from Metacafe, please understand that this was necessary for the continued success of the program. If we could have merely removed the videos from the program without also removing them from the site, we would have. Unfortunately, though, removing videos from Producer Rewards® means stopping the view count, and the only way to do that and compensate producers correctly is through removal. Besides, it would not be fair for us to stop paying for video views but still receive the benefit of those views.

If your video was removed and you want it re-published on the site (outside of the Producer Rewards® program), please e-mail customersupport@metacafe.com and agree to the following statement:

I give my consent to Metacafe to republish my video(s) on the Metacafe website, outside of the Producer Rewards® program. I am aware that said video(s) will no longer be eligible for payment for any views accumulated.

Assuming your video meets our general content standards, we will re-publish it immediately – with the views and VideoRank™ as they were prior to removal. Re-publishing also preserves all embedded versions of your videos, so don’t worry about the hours you spent marketing your work.

It is our sincere hope that you will remain part of the Metacafe community and continue submitting outstanding original works to the Producer Rewards® program.

Thank you, and best of luck on all future productions!

We are making some important changes to the Metacafe Producer Rewards® program. These changes, effective immediately, are designed to meet two objectives:
1. Help us develop short-form video as an entertainment genre by showcasing a broad spectrum of content that is entertaining to a large and diverse audience; and
2. Address concerns from viewers and advertisers about content that is inappropriate or uninteresting.

The basic structure of the program remains intact: Any creator of an original video that meets the program requirements may submit his or her video for consideration. We pay $5 per 1,000 views – you receive your first payment of $100 after your video crosses the 20,000 views mark and has been accepted into the program.

What we’re updating are the criteria for acceptance into the program. A complete description of the Producer Rewards® program and its requirements is available here. We encourage all creators to review this detail before submitting a video to Producer Rewards®.

The most significant changes to the program are as follows:

• Going forward, we will not accept the following types of videos into the Producer Rewards® program on the basis that they are inappropriate or uninteresting:
­ - Videos that have sexual arousal as their primary purpose
­ - Videos that are primarily promotional vehicles for a product or service
­ - Videos that merely feature a person who is not doing anything entertaining or exceptional

• Note: Videos previously accepted into Producer Rewards® that fall into the categories described above have been removed from the program and the site. Affected creators will be paid for views that occurred before February 11, 2008. And they may re-publish their video on Metacafe, though it is ineligible for future payments.

• Going forward, videos that instruct viewers how to do something unsavory or potentially harmful to others – such as make a bomb or gun – will not be published on the Metacafe web site, as these do not meet our general content standards. Any such videos that may have previously been accepted into Producer Rewards ® have been removed from the program and the site and are not eligible for re-publication on Metacafe.

• Additionally, in the interest of delivering an exceptional entertainment experience well-suited to a large and diverse audience, we will be actively encouraging video creators to stretch their creative muscles and discouraging people from submitting “copycat” videos.
- Specifically, we will not accept videos into the Producer Rewards® program that are substantially similar to another video already in the program.
- ­ We are also adding a “trends exhausted” page to the web site that will specify video themes that we are choosing to retire from the Producer Rewards® program on the basis that we have enough of a particular type of content and are receiving community complaints indicating viewer fatigue. This list will be updated regularly, and we encourage video creators to check it before producing their work or submitting it to the Producer Rewards® program. The current list of exhausted trends is available here.

• Note: Creators who submitted their work to the Producer Rewards® program prior to the public communication on our web site of an exhausted trend will not be impacted. But any submissions received after a theme is posted to the “trends exhausted” page will be automatically rejected from the program.

After a year of running the program, we’ve learned a lot to help us better bring the creative spirit of Producer Rewards® to life and ensure that the program supports our goals of delivering an exceptional entertainment experience to our 30 million unique monthly viewers worldwide and building Metacafe into a global media company focused on short-form video entertainment powered and programmed by the audience.

Our intent is to maintain clear and transparent acceptance criteria so that video creators know what content is most likely to succeed. We are committed to making decisions that are consistent, fair and serve the shared best interests of our producers, viewers and advertisers. You’ll also notice in the full description of the program that we do reserve the right to make exceptions for exceptional videos.

We operate in a dynamic environment, and it is likely that we will introduce additional changes to the Producer Rewards® program in the future, which we will communicate as clearly and quickly as possible.

For all you Facebook users out there - and recently it seems like everyone has joined - here’s another addictive, time-burning application to get you caught up on the best entertainment on the web…the Metacafe Facebook application!

Now you can easily share your favorite Metacafe videos with your Facebook friends or see what’s popular in your different networks.

In addition to the Facebook app, we have our “share this video on Facebook” button on all video pages, allowing you to post cool clips to your profile or send them to your friends.

Our future Facebook plans include integration into popular applications like FunWall and Super Wall, so check back here in the future and make sure download the app now!

Drum-roll, please…we’re excited to introduce our new tagline.

Video Entertainment, Powered By You

We’re excited because these five little words actually do a pretty darn good job of explaining what’s so cool about Metacafe (in our humble opinion).

And, of course, what’s so cool is YOU… the more than 30 million unique viewers each month that help create the Metacafe entertainment experience.
• You create and submit the videos.
• You review the video submissions.
• Your reactions determine which videos are showcased on the site.
• Your views determine which producers get paid and how much they earn.

In this same spirit, we solicited audience input as we were considering options for a new tagline – and this one consistently proved popular among the producers and viewers we surveyed. Thanks again for taking the time to share your opinions.

For a little more (entertaining) commentary on how each of you helps bring this idea to life every time you visit Metacafe, check out this video Dane from Gagfilms produced:

Video Entertainment Powered By You - More free videos are here

It’s been a year (okay, technically, a year and a few weeks) since we launched Producer Rewards. For the Metacafe newbies reading this, Producer Rewards is a program in which we pay producers US $5 for every thousand views an original video gets on our site. Coincidentally, the one-year anniversary also marks the $1 million milestone – meaning that independent video creators (more than 550 of them) have collectively earned more than $1 million to-date. Pretty sweet, uh?

Since it’s also the end of the year, we’re closing 2007 with a countdown of the Best of Producer Rewards videos. Some of these videos have generated quite a buzz for our humble site. Reminisce with us (or enjoy them for the first time) by viewing the videos here.

Also, Assaf P wrote a pretty cool article on how some of our top earners spent their hard-earned Producer Rewards money. I’ve attached the link here.

Award season is here, and we want Metacafe to be named Best Video Site on Mashable’s Open Web Awards. The Open Web Awards (OWAs) are a distributed contest to find the best sites on the Web.

Voting ends on Sunday December 16th at 11:59 PM, so act fast and tell your friends! Let’s make what we already know official…Metacafe is #1.