Perhaps then it’s not just co-incidence that on the day that US-based Vevo crosses the pond, Muzu.TV has announced a partnership with Metacafe, which will see it bed down in Europe and hopefully consolidate its dominance locally.

I say Europe because, even though Metacafe itself it US-based, the new content deal with Muzu.TV focuses primarily on users in Europe, such is the limitation of Muzu.TV’s licensing deals with all four major labels. That said, its catalogue of 85,000 videos dwarfs music industry-backed Vevo (presuming you can access it), allowing the London and Ireland-based company to make the claim to be the largest legal catalogue of online music videos in the world.

Thus, as of today, Metacafe’s 10 million unique monthly users in Europe now have access and in addition to video content from all four major record labels, key independents and exclusive live footage (in the form of Muzu.TV’s “Live and Loud” sessions) and behind the scenes videos, are also being made available. Outside of Europe, however, including the US, Metacafe users are limited to Muzu.TV’s independent catalogue. It seems the world isn’t flat after all.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of posts by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.Previously, he wrote about the State of Online Video, 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising, and Context is King: How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online.  In part 4 today, he examines where he thinks the sweet spot is for making money in onljne video. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.

In Search of Profits

Ten years ago, web companies didn’t generate much revenue.   These days, web companies are some of the most profitable around.  Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable.

Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses?

Ad Networks Are Low Margin Businesses

This week, video ad network Brightroll raised $10 million from Scale Venture Partners.  Ad networks aggregate audiences and sell ads to marketers, sharing the proceeds with publishers/producers.  Scale’s Rob Theis’ argues: “the most strategic Internet investments are those that compete not with other Internet businesses, but with the much larger amount of money still being spent offline.”

Brightroll’s CEO Tod Sacerdoti added: “I think by this time next year the majority of the top five to ten video properties by any measure will be aggregator networks.  The best example for this is display advertising.”  Indeed, networks have an unmatched ability to scale but can also crash to the ground awfully fast.

The low margin is the least of their problems; differentiation and defensibility are.  Blue Lithium and Right Media hit jackpots by selling to Yahoo!  But those who didn’t sell (Tribal Fusion, Valueclick) suddenly found themselves under pressure from search advertising on performance and video on branding.

Content Networks Have Little Differentiation

Similarly, aggregators gather videos from content providers, sharing ad revenues.  iFilm (sold to Viacom, renamed Spike), Guba, Grouper (sold to SONY, renamed Crackle), Revver, YouTube (sold to Google), Veoh, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Viddler, blip.tv, are all vying for content, audiences and dollars.

YouTube is master of this domain.  Hulu is giving YouTube a run for its money, but the business model is anything but certain and its long term exit strategy is murky (Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal/Comcast are shareholders but also competitors).

Ultimately, ad and content networks operate in a high-risk, winner-take-all game.   For publishers, it’s a lower risk world.  Consider the two acquisitions News Corp. made in 2005: Rupert Murdoch paid more for IGN ($650M) than for MySpace ($580 million), but MySpace’s subsequent growth made him look like a genius (for a while).  Today, MySpace is searching for its raison d’etre while IGN treks along as an unstoppable force in its sphere.

The Myth of Hyper Distribution?

In online video, producers are agnostic to distribution channel or platform.  To reduce risk, they diversify distribution, but the jury’s out on whether hyper distribution bears fruit.  Hyper distribution refers to syndicating one’s content as broadly as possible with little or no restrictions.

When it comes to generating revenues, is hyper-distribution wise?  Not according to Chris Pirillo, a prosumer video producer who leverages video to promote his empire but only counts YouTube as a commercial platform: “YouTube offers the largest audiences and generates most the revenue.  If you’re not YouTube, you have challenges in creating value for content producers”.  If that changes, look out for Freewheel, which according to CEO Doug Knopper allows “media companies and content owners to be able to monetize their video libraries across multiple channels and devices”.

Advertisers Follow Audiences…

Ex-Disney CEO Michael Eisner doesn’t pretend to know how the industry is going to play out, but he’s got no doubts what the end result will be: “I don’t know if the growth in content made for the Internet will be evolutionary or revolutionary, but it can’t not happen: a death march has been going on for other media who are in trouble because there is a more efficient way to share content around the world with the Internet.”

Business Models Take Time to Develop

Eisner made his fortune in television.  One VC who’s made his online has another opinion.  In Fred Wilson’s influential 2005 post “The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed)”, he suggests to:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

In theory, in the future when video streams monetize the way search queries have (whereby a search query is always associated with some kind of paid listing) then perhaps Wilson’s thesis will prove right.  But in practice, at least in the five years that have passed since the post, it’s been a recipe for financial disaster.

Hyper distribution is great for promotional purposes but not necessarily for commercial purposes.  Marketers do pay more attention as an audience grows, but they also pay a premium for scarcity and exclusivity.

This is the fundamental conundrum facing new media producers who rely on hyper-distribution to build brands and audiences but who weaken their pricing power and ability to secure guaranteed dollars by giving away their videos.  This can work if you can build ad-supported businesses, but that takes time and money.

Today, a few new media producers have managed to build ad-supported businesses, namely Revision3 and Next New Networks.  But between the two, they have raised over $30 million in venture capital.  Most producers don’t have that luxury.  For those others, I recommend creating content that other media companies will pay for, to buy them enough time to build a syndication business and eventually, a fully ad-supported business which commands the large ad dollars.

An imperfect but useful analogy I use is the banking model, where retail, corporate and investment banking fees can create a large business.

This diversified strategy provides:

• a safe income stream:  licensing, like retail banking, provides a recurring and non-volatile revenue base.
• a growth business: syndication, like corporate banking, requires other companies in the ecosystem to do well.  This can provide higher CPM rates by placing content in the right context.
• a wildly lucrative stream: advertising, like investment banking, takes time to develop, is speculative and seasonal, and risks drying up abruptly.  Notice how advertising revenue spikes each fourth quarter, for example.

The reason why I place content producers in the highest Profitability circle over time  in the first chart above is because only they can build such a business.  (The Profitability Index represented in the chart takes into account operating margins and total return on investment, including likelihood of a liquidity event).  And, yes, I am completely biased, since this is the kind of business I am trying to build with WatchMojo.  Aggregators and networks are solely advertising based businesses; just ask YouTube who generated $10,000 in a paid model test, even though it can generate billions in simpler ways.  Video advertising will be a bigger business, but not necessarily a higher-margin business.

Video will be Everywhere: on all Websites

Video on the Web is no longer just about entertainment.  It is also about marketing, instruction, and conveying information of all kinds.

• Content bellwether Wikipedia announced it will be rolling out videos soon enough.
• e-Commerce leader Zappos encourages users to submit their video experiences which increase sales 6% to 30%.  In 2010, it will create 50,000 videos.
• It won’t be long before organizations feature their accountants, lawyers, management, VCs in videos too.

Video will be Everywhere: in Ads

Videos won’t simply be on all websites; video ads will converge with rich media and display banners.  Publishers and ad networks will swap out low yield ad placements for videos that sell at a premium.  Rupert Murdoch is right to say that there isn’t enough advertising to make all publishing online profitable, but if you insert a video-enabled ad where a display banner exists today, maybe it will become more profitable, as video rates tend to generate a tenfold premium over display banners.  Of course, the flip side of that argument is that if video ad inventory lost all scarcity as display banners have, then it rates would also see a steep drop.

Video is the Anti-Search

Google’s dominance of the Web today stems from a perfect storm.  Search benefitted from low expectations.   Whereas Google’s competitors threw in the towel to focus on portaldom (or outright handed them the business), online video companies’ war chests seemingly have no bottom as they wage the war for the online audience.

With YouTube being a unit of Google, it’s hard to compete being a pure video aggregator.  Those who have tried are flailing badly.  Yet video’s expectations have always been high and will only get higher.

History Repeats Itself

Video will follow search in two ways though.

Search is software and Google is the only successful ad-supported technology company.  Video is media, which has a natural disposition to embrace ad-supported models.  As such, advertising will monetize video streams.  In fact, as large ad agencies and marketers shift online, they’ll embrace branding campaigns and push video advertising could eventually top search advertising.  Once that starts, online advertising will surpass television, it’s already happened in the UK.

Search for The Leading Ad Format

Everyone agrees that video advertising will be huge but what will the prevailing ad format be?

Stakeholders are obsessed with finding the ad format likely to follow television’s 30-second ad spot and search’s paid listings.

What might lead the way?

Pre-rolls are the equivalent of pop-ups (and mid/post rolls the equivalent of pop-unders) in that users hate them, but unlike pop-ups, I actually think pre-rolls won’t disappear, mainly because

• They’re the most in-demand ad format (according to Brightroll CEO Tod Sacerdoti)
• It is easier to include a pre-roll when you’re syndicating to other websites and platforms (says blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan)
• But largely because they’ll get more user-friendly: the 30-second ad will make way for 5-10 second interactive pre-rolls (SpotXchange CEO Michael Shehan).

However, there will always be properties which will forego pre-roll revenue to improve the user experience in order to build audiences, and all else being equal users will migrate to those sites.  So I’m not sure the pre-roll will remain all that ubiquitous.  The other problem with pre-rolls is lack of attention.  When a pre-roll starts, I tune out and look for my headphones or go grab a coffee.

That’s why I like the contextual display banner (and not necessarily the companion banner).  A companion banner comes bundled with the video pre-roll, but sits alongside the video  A contextual banner comes without the pre-roll.  Whereas most banners disappear quickly next to text with one downward scroll of the mouse, alongside a video player, that banner becomes quite valuable and top-of-mind since people are just staring at the video.

We’ve also seen the rise (and fall) of overlays, which is basically an expanded Picture-in-Picture (PIP) format; we know how that fared.

Of course, content producers are also salivating over branded content (more than product integration and product placement, the brand becomes central to the story) or outright sponsorships.

Finally, there’s the Web’s favorite offspring: the viral video.  Viral video is not an ad format, of course, but it is not quite branded content nor is it supported by ads.  As these become more common, achieving success with content alone becomes a sure-fire recipe for failure.  All content will need to be supported by a media buy or some kind of promotional push.  After all, on TV you spend millions creating an ad but you need to buy media spots to promote it.  It’s not going to be that different online.  Yes, it’s a meritocracy, but it’s a loud, cluttered one.

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid

There won’t be a single dominant ad format but the holy grail will prove simpler than expected.  It always does.

Remember Don Lapre’s infomercials?  He would go on and on about placing “Tiny Classified Ads” in newspapers.  I never thought much of those ads until Google’s adoption of (essentially) little text ads next to search results led to their explosive growth.

Sometimes in business, the solution is simpler than you can imagine.

I spent a few hours with Eyal Hertzog, the company’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer who walked me through the company’s new product vision and the rationale for its big bet on the wiki approach to organizing videos. Hertzog was frustrated that users (he being among them) couldn’t just locate “THE” result when searching for a video. His definition of “THE” being a single video result that encompasses all the relevant (and preferably accurate) info, along with multiple language versions, captioning, and so on. The current reality, of course, is that when we perform a search for a video we get back multiple results—sometimes even in the hundreds—from multiple sources, in various languages, with different view counts, fake versions . . .. You all know the drill.

Hertzog explains:

“We actually believe that quality metadata is as important – if not more important – than the videos themselves. We’re focused on delivering a great entertainment experience through short-form video, which means we have to make it easy for people to find and discover great videos every time they come to Metacafe. The only way to do that is to have accurate and complete information about what the videos on our site are about. And we believe the only way to get that information is to enlist our community’s help. WikiCafe is absolutely essential to our strategy going forward, and we believe it gives us an unprecedented competitive advantage over other sites.”

Put simply, WikiCafe is everything you’ve come to learn to love about Wikipedia but attuned to video. It is a collaborative video metadata editing tool built on top of WikiMedia, the Wiki platform originally written for Wikipedia. Its purpose is to foster collaboration and aggregation of standardized, categorized knowledge on a single “document”—in this case a video.

The collaborative taxonomy used by WikiCafe is created and maintained by the community, so just like Wikipedia, it has the potential to become more comprehensive and accurate over time. Of course another major benefit is that the community polices the edits the data so the amount of false-positives and spammy results could dramatically decrease—not all at once, but Rome too wasn’t built in a single day.

The backbone of the system is an advanced tagging system that supports:

• Redirects: Tags such as ‘PS3′, ‘PSIII’, ‘PlayStationIII’ are all redirected to ‘PlayStation 3′.
• Disambiguation: ‘Apple’ as a tag would offer as options ‘Apple (Computers)’, ‘Apple (Record Label)’, ‘Apple’ (Fruit).
• Tag Hierarchies: The tag ‘iPhone’ is a child to ‘Apple Computers’ and ‘Smartphones’. ‘Apple Computers’ is a child to ‘Technology’ and ‘Smartphones’ is a child to ‘Cellular Phones’ which is a child to ‘Phones’ which is a child to “Communication Devices”.
• Tag Translations: Videos that are tagged with one language tag are automatically ‘tagged’ in all the other languages as well, thereby providing language-transparent search. This means that users using non-Germanic languages such as Hebrew or Japanese for example would be able to search for say ‘Britney Spears’ in their native character-set and get results as if they used English.

Editable metadata information includes Title, Description, Rating Properties (sexy, violence), Language, Country of Relevance, and more. There are also metadata templates such as “Music Info” that includes Album, Artist, Genre, and Label. There are also flags such as “Suspected Duplicate” and “Misleading Thumbnail”.

While Hertzog gave me a walk through we edited this video’s tags from ‘TechBrunch’ to ‘TechCrunch, and added ‘Michael Arrington’ to the already existing tags ‘Michael’ and ‘Arringon’. You can see the revision history here.

So far WikiCafe is exceeding the company’s expectations. The system is currently logging 14,000 user Edit Actions per day, up from 4000 in September. In my book Metacafe deserves kudos in this respect as well because forming a collaborative community is in many respects far more difficult than delivering the collaborative technology.

ComScore’s September numbers position Metacafe as the web’s largest independent video site with 38M unique users worldwide, led only by YouTube and MSN (it passed DailyMotion and AOL Video in the summer). Time will tell whether Metacafe’s gamble on WikiCafe will pay off, but you have to admire the company’s vision and courage. Instead of sitting still it’s pushing the envelope in delivering its audience the most accurate video results. Speaking for myself, I’ve begun developing a habit of searching Metacafe before trying my luck on YouTube.

Howcast, the instructional video site founded by three ex-Googlers, today announced that it has formed distribution agreements with AOL, Metacafe, Bebo, and blip.tv.

Howcast provides professionally produced instructional videos that range from “How to Make Sushi” to “How To Make a Water Gun Alarm Clock“. Many films come from the site’s Directors Program, which pays qualified members a small fee to produce guides that follow a supplied Howcast template. Directors receive increased compensation through a rev-share system for especially popular videos.

Howcast says that the new distribution deals will significantly expand its audience. The site had previously established distribution agreements with Myspace, YouTube, Verizon FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO.

Howcast has a number of competitors in this space, including 5min, Videojug, and to some extent, Instructables.

Arik Czerniak is now working on Clear Applications, a company that he co-founded seven months ago with two other Metacafe ex-employees, Oren Blatt and Gil Solomon. The startup is developing analytics tools that will help medium and large-sized businesses filter through thousands of job applications and identify those candidates with the best personal and cognitive skills.

Blatt, a former fighter pilot for the Israeli air force, holds the position of CEO. The company reportedly has six employees and is self-funded. No word yet on when they might launch their product, but it’s definitely not imminent; the Clear Applications website still points to a parked page.

All,
As of 20.3 I’m no longer using this email.

[Updated with corrections: Due to a prior error in translation from the Hebrew, we reported earlier that both founders together had a 5 percent stake, but each one actually had a 5 percent stake, or 10 percent total). Both Czerniak’s and Adler’s shares together represented only 5 percent each of the company, and had fully vested. Each reportedly received $2.5 million, but their shares were not priced at the company’s most recent round of funding. Rather, the price was based on an earlier valuation of $50 million. The company has raised more than $45 million so far, with a $30 million round as recently as last August. And back in late 2006 it unsuccessfully tried to shop itself around for $200 to $300 million. The article cites conflicts with Hachenburg and the strategic direction of the company. But maybe they just didn’t think anyone would ever buy it.

Metacafe is still one of the top video-sharing sites, with 28 million unique visitors worldwide in March, according to comScore. But it’s growth has been pretty lackluster all year (up 15 percent). Meanwhile, YouTube keeps widening the gap with nearly ten times as many worldwide unique visitors, 288 million, and a faster growth rate (up 78 percent). And in the same period, Veoh‘s worldwide uniques have more than tripled to 17.5 million. These numbers do not include embedded videos for either service, but they give a good indication of the overall popularity of each site.

Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

The new service is offered by way of a partnership with Peerbox whose solution goes beyond video download/upload to include social functionality such as rating, commenting, etc. Peerbox primarily supports handset vendors Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

The exclusive screenshot below shows how the integration from the MetaCafe side will look like.

Unlike YouTube, MetaCafe has not been afraid to experiment. This partnership comes after moves such as a pilot with adap.tv and the Producer Rewards program.

Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience – which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position – we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

Viewers can sort by most dugg, highest rated, most discussed, most viewed, etc. Only Metacafe videos are shown.

Digg’s video channel and Metacafe overlap somewhat, particularly for people who just want to quickly find and browse interesting videos. That makes this pairing somewhat unlikely – I would have expected Metacafe to simply build their own Digg-like voting system or use Pligg’s open source software (see VideoSift’s similar functionality, which was recently in the news). The fact that they are working with Digg shows that they are willing to hitch their brand to that shooting star, damn the competitive angle.

Metacafe released a press release this afternoon on the new functionality. Notably absent from the release was Digg, who did not jointly release it, or provide a quote. (Update – see comment #2 below).

Skype 3.5 has a couple more features like auto redial and you can transfer incoming calls to another person or group on Skype and Pro subscribers you can forward calls onto a landline or mobile phone.

But we are hearing that those discussions may have stalled due to the recent release of November Comscore traffic numbers. The number of monthly unique visitors to Metacafe continues to decline from a high of 4.2 million in September, to just 3.1 million in November, a drop of approximately 25%. Total page views are relatively flat over this period, going from 97 million in September to 101 million in November.

Acquirors are also expressing concern over the relatively large percentage of “adult content” hosted by Metacafe – a profitable but difficult business to be in.

In July, Metacafe recieved $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. The company was founded in 2004 and has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

We are currently calling press reps at Yahoo to inquire about the acquisition, which would be surprising, given their recent commitment to reorganization.

When we covered Metacafe’s funding news, we called it a hybrid between YouTube and Fark.

Update: We’ve taken a look at Metacafe’s Comscore stats relative to YouTube. Comscore reports that Metacafe had 3.8 million unique visitors and 83 million page views in October 2006. That compares to YouTube’s 23 million unique visitors and 1.5 billion page views. These stats are U.S. only.

Benchmark Capital has made investments in eBay, Zillow.com, Pagflakes and many other online services. Benchmark had given MetaCafe $5 mill in a previous round of funding. Accel Partners adds Metacafe to a portfolio that includes Brightcove, comScore, RealNetworks and Walmart.com.

The company will use its new funding to ramp up its infrastructure and open an office in San Francisco.