Metacafe, with more than 25 million visitors a month, aims to be one of the most influential video-sharing sites in the world. The company recently relocated from Israel to Silicon Valley and doubled its staff to 70 employees. It also generated a lot of buzz when it rolled out a cash-reward program to draw high-quality videos to its site. For each new submission, users are paid $5 for per 1,000 page views after the first 20,000 views. The plan is working. In the first two months after the program launched last year, Metacafe paid $10,000 to five individual users, and one producer received nearly $26,000 for a single video.
CEO: Erick Hachenberg
Location: Palo Alto, CA (formerly Tel Aviv, Israel)
URL: metacafe.com
Launch: July 2003
Funding: $15 million (second round from Benchmark Capital and Accel Ventures)
It's not just Silicon Valley. The user-generated revolution is in full swing worldwide. We pick the best non-U.S. sites to watch. (more) 
Some of the world's most promising tech companies are outside the U.S. See where they are -- and what they're up to. (more) 
With our interactive map, you can see a country-by-country breakdown of Web usage across the globe. (more) 
