by Aner Ravon
MetaCafe appointed a new CEO today. Erick Hachenburg of Electronic Arts will be replacing Co-Founder Arik Czerniak. This move is the most recent in a series of executive recruits which included new VP of Sales, VP of Marketing and Executive Chairman. A quick look at Mr. Hachenburg’s resume reveals deep experience in online media executive and business management. Perhaps more importantly, Mr. Hachenburg brings along recent and successful experience from the Asian market for which he was responsible at Electronic Arts.
According to Allison Campa, MetaCafe’s VP of Marketing, MetaCafe had 17 million unique visitors in December, an increase from 16 million unique visitors in November. Such volume must be monetizable, period, and no one should know better how to monetize it than an ex-GM Asia from a company that generated $3B from online media last year alone.
I argued before that YouTube has not conquered the market, simply because the market is still at it’s infancy. There’s plenty of room for MetaCafe (and others) to grow. The Asian market may prove more promising in the long run and MetaCafe have already established good presence there.
In online media market share means a little less than absolute traffic. People watch more than one TV station and read more than one newspaper. The same logic applies to the Internet as well. If video advertising takes off, so will both YouTube and MetaCafe regardless of their respective market share. If, on the other hand, video advertising will not live up to the promise then both will need to get creative.
In either case, most of the critiques would happily trade places with MetaCafe. 17 Million unique views per month means huge potential. MetaCafe have built a great end user product and have succeeded in creating that potential. Now it’s time to shift gears and take it to the next level - securing market positions and generating a profit. Right now my impression is that MetaCafe are doing exactly what the doctor has ordered.
Aner Ravon
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