Internet video ：We try harder 再接再厉

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11/14/2006

Internet video ：We try harder 再接再厉

Internet video
网络视频

We try harder
再接再厉

Nov 9th 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

If YouTube is the Hertz of web-based video, Metacafe wants to be Avis
如果YouTube是网络视频领域的Hertz，那么Metacafe就要做Avis

TEN years in the Israeli army, seven of them flying war planes, "teaches you to be aggressive and confident," says Arik Czerniak, the co-founder of Metacafe, a video-sharing website. That certainly helps if your start-up happens to compete with YouTube, the web-video superpower that is being taken over by Google, the biggest search engine. (American regulators approved the takeover on November 3rd.) Although YouTube is skilled at building online communities around video clips, says Mr Czerniak, it appears strangely uninterested in solving two bigger problems that are still holding back the genre of web video: quality control and incentives for contributors. So Metacafe, which is now the largest independent video-sharing site (see chart), is having a go.

在以色列军队服役的十年中，有七年在战斗机上度过，"它教你学会进取和自信，"视频分享网站Metacafe的合伙创始人Arik Czerniak说。如果你的新生意正好与最大的搜索引擎Google所收购的网络视频巨擎YouTube竞争的话，这些（品质）当然有所帮助。（美国（反垄断）审查人员在11月3日认可了这次收购）。虽然YouTube专注于建立围绕视频片段的在线社区，Czerniak先生说，但是它却对解决两个重大问题缺乏兴趣，分别是质量控制和对贡献的激励，这两大问题仍然制约着网络视频媒体（的发展）。所以作为最大的独立视频分享网站，Metcafe正在朝这两方面努力。

The overwhelming majority of videos submitted by amateurs to video sites are dross. Sites like YouTube teem with videos that are duplicates or are so bad as to be unwatchable. A very few clips break out and become wildly popular, but most remain obscure and are simply shared among a few friends. Some 90% of the clips viewed on YouTube are in this "long tail", in the language of statistics, rather than being smash hits.

对于视频网站来说，占最大头的由业余人士提交的视频作品都是质量较低的。像YouTube这样的网站充斥着盗版和糟到不堪入目的作品。仅有极少的片段脱颖而出并广为流传，而大多数都不为人知或者仅在为数不多的朋友圈内分享。在YouTube上被观看的90%的小视频落于那条"长尾"之内，存在于统计意义中，远离"畅销排行榜"。

Like YouTube, Metacafe makes money by selling advertising on its site. But unlike its rival, it makes an effort to choose and promote "good" videos on its home page. First, it rejects duplicates (about half of submissions). Then it uses 100,000 volunteers as film critics-just as Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, uses volunteers to write and vet articles. As a third filter, Metacafe then analyses the clips with its VideoRank algorithm, which crunches all sorts of metrics (whether viewers watch a clip to the end, for instance) in order to rank them-rather as Google's famous PageRank algorithm ranks web-search results.

和YouTube一样，Metacafe通过网内的广告销售赚钱。但是与YouTube不同，它在首页上发挥了筛选与推荐"好东西"的作用。首先，它拒绝了盗版（大约占被提交作品的一半）。接着，它用100，000志愿者作影评员--就像免费的在线百科全书维基百科一样，它让志愿者来撰写和评价文本（的可靠性）。作为第三道过滤，Metacafe依靠其视频排序（VideoRank）的构架设计来对小视频进行分析，这种设计能抓取多线程的数据（比如观看者是否将一个小视频从头看到尾）从而对视频进行排序--就像Google著名的PageRank构架对网页搜索结果进行排序一样。

Whether Metacafe's stuff is any good is entirely subjective, of course. Much of the content its volunteers and its algorithm approve is soft porn, and a lot, as on YouTube, violates copyright. But the system does produce statistics that are roughly the inverse of YouTube's: about 90% of the clips viewed are in the statistical "head", not the "tail"-ie, they are popular clips featured on the home page. Counting all views, YouTube is ten times bigger than Metacafe, says Mr Czerniak, who recently moved his company's headquarters from Tel Aviv to San Francisco; but counting only views of the top 200 videos on each site, Metacafe wins by a whisker.

当然，Metacafe的内容好坏完全是主观的。它的志愿者和设计构架所推荐的内容大多属于软色情，而且有很多和YouTube同样，存在着侵权问题。但是系统的确提供了粗略地与YouTube情况相反的统计信息：约90%被观看的小视频落于统计分布图的"头"部，而不是"尾"部，他们是被展示在首页上的受欢迎的视频。统计观看总量的话，YouTube是Metacafe的10倍；但是只计算彼此网站上前200名的视频观看量的话，Metacafe则险胜 YouTube，Czerniak先生说。最近他把他的公司总部从特拉维夫搬到了旧金山。

For Mr Czerniak, this matters because it should offer creative types a bigger and more meritocratic platform for getting noticed. An amateur video-artist uploading to YouTube, he says, is like an aspiring actress "driving to Los Angeles and waiting tables to get noticed by a producer". On Metacafe, he argues, if she is good, she could be "promoted on a silver platter". To add a financial incentive for such talented hopefuls, Metacafe has just launched a "producer rewards" system. Other sites have tried this, but Metacafe wants to take it furthest. Under its system, those who upload videos can explicitly license their content to Metacafe and in return get paid $5 for every 1,000 views. During a recent trial run, Joe Eigo, a martial artist from Toronto, made $23,000 with a video of his acrobatic flips and kicks.

对于Czerniak先生来说，（导致上述结果的）重要原因是它提供了一个更大规模的创新型贤人治理模式来吸引眼球。他说，一个向YouTube上传作品的视频艺术家的境况可能就像个做明星梦的女演员那样"驾车来到洛杉矶，在小酒馆打工期待被制片人发现。"而在Metacafe，他声称，如果她是优秀的，她可以被晋升为"银碟"。为了提供这些有天赋的希望之星以财富激励，Metacafe还刚刚推出了一个"制作人奖励"系统。其他网站也有这类尝试，但是 Metacafe想要将其推向更高层次。在它的系统中，上传视频的人们可以直接将其内容授权给Metacafe并且每千次观看可获得5美元收入。在最近的试行中，一个来自多伦多的名叫Joe Eigo的视频制作者因其腾空翻加踢腿的特技表演录像获得了23，000美元。

YouTube got ahead because "the community really cared about the site, were invested in it and protective of it," says a rival to Metacafe. "There is no substitute for this," he says; paying for content isn't the same. Mr Czerniak disagrees. He reckons that a nexus of "user-licensed" content plus a quality sieve represents "the next revolution" in web video. Stay tuned.

YouTube之所以拔得头筹是因为"真正关注站点的社区才能到投入和维护，"一个Metacafe的竞争对手说，"这一点是无法替代的，"他说；而为内容付钱违背了这个规律。Czerniak先生并不同意。他认为由"使用者许可协议"联系起来的内容附加上一种质量筛选机制，这才是网络视频领域的"下一次革命"。让我们拭目以待吧。

补充一个长尾的示意图：前段红色为“头”，后段黄色为“尾”，一般说，观看量最高的作品占据头部，而尾部其实还有无限数量的作品可以满足人们的个性化需求，这部分尾部作品可以满足的需求其实是无限的利基市场，可以通过个低成本的网络交易达成。