Metacafe Sucks
So the past month I have been screwing around with Metacafe. I was really optimistic at first. I came up with a bunch of great ideas, not only for videos but also for drawing views to those videos.
My biggest idea was to film an X-ray tutroial. Basically showing how to see through clothing with an image editor. It's something that a lot of guys are interested in, and also something that I happen to be very good at. The idea was that I would have this tutorial up, alongside 15 or so time lapse demonstrations of various celebrities getting x-rayed. The tutorial would be clean, the demonstrations would not. They would be posted on every tube site that would allow them, redtube, youtube, fruedtube, pornhub, etc. Each of them linking back to the original tutorial (which I am getting paid for). I am confident that this method WOULD have earned me a lot of money.
However, there are several problems with Metacafe preventing me from doing this. One is their ambiguous terms for the producer rewards program. As the verbiage currently stands, any and all videos posted can be construed in some way to violate those terms. I modified, reshot, and recompiled the video a half dozen times, using a variety of subjects and methods to fit those terms. Each time I made the video impossible to disqualify for the same reason it was disqualified previously.
My latest shot was perfect. It was done on a model taken from a "creative commons" image with no restrictions. (That means I am free to modify, and profit from any work using the image). The model's head was cropped out, so I wouldn't need her permission. She was wearing a bra to avoid the disqualifying 18+ rating. It was perfect. And it was rejected, again.
So I wrote a frustrated but polite email to Metacafe. They responded within 24 hours (which was nice) stating that the video was disqualified because it violated their, "Not a video" terms, which stated basically that:
No slide shows
No music only videos
No fractals
No media other then a video
However in their email they had changed the terms. Now "a series of computer stills" was on the list.
Seems to have been tailor made specifically for me! I checked, and sure enough that was now on the list. I do seriously doubt they added that just for me, unless they got wise to my plan. I did allready have 3 great demonstrations up that were getting alot of views. The screencap and title were both provocative, and it was showing much desired information. I had the potential to get that tutorial into the millions of views. But so what if I did? For each view the tutorial got, there was 100 views to the demonstrations. Metacafe doesn't pay for 18+ material, but they still make money off of it. It would have been good for them.
So I'm a little frustrated with them to say the least. I'm not going to abandon them completely, but I am broadening my horizons. I just started with Break.com today.
Metacafe still does have a lot of potential for me. All I need is a wierd / funny fix to a common problem that everybody has, and I'll make money. Still easy. But I do feel like they have pulled the legs out from under me.
