YNet news has the exclusive that Tel Aviv-based video sharing site Metacafe may be sold for $200 million. There were a few rumors involving Yahoo, but now YNet says talks with an unnamed company are in the "advanced stages".
The site was founded in July 2003, and is now one of the world's most popular video sharing services - so far they've raised about $20 million from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners, and they currently have 40 employees between their offices in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto. How big is Metacafe? They currently have more than 17 million users per month and more than 450 million monthly pageviews. According to ComScore, they're ranked third out of the video sharing sites, and traffic grew 400% from January to October 2006. It's also worth noting that Metacafe uses a system called "VideoRank", which aims to extract a selection of high quality videos, rather than bombarding users with masses of content.