MetaCafe is in negotiations to be sold for 200-million. I wouldn't pay a dime for this piece of crap product/company. I had a terrible experience with MetaCafe when I decided that the thumbnail shot I'd chosen for a video I'd posted to the video sharing site looked weird and vaguely obscene. (Chosing your own thumbnail was a cool feature, or so I thought at the time, of the uploading process.) I decided I hated my choice, though, after seeing the final, posted product.
But there is no way to edit your thumbnail choices on MetaCafe once you've made them, nor can you delete your videos once you've posted them! After clicking through the site for what seemed like an hour, I finally found this page. Whew, I thought. I can delete now. Wrong. There simply was no “Remove From Metacafe” link anywhere for me to click in my My Videos list. Such an option simply does not exist.
But I kept trying like like crazy to change the thumbnail and delete the questionable video, but since there's no live customer service support or functional blog associated with the site, only this useless Help thingee, I ended-up calling some clueless PR person in Palo Alto, the only live number listed on the site.
To their credit, someone with the Palo Alto marketing office did return my panicky call later that evening, and then someone sent an email two days later when I filled-out and sent in this form, asking me to re-send/re-capture a thumbnail shot (I wasn't quite sure how to do this without their uploading wizard prompting me) and send it back to them.
The video thumbnail in question has since mysteriously disappeared from my My Videos list, as have all the others I posted too, but I have no way of deleting the actual space I'd parked it on, or the copy I wrote associated with this video.
The whole experience made me feel powerless and vulnerable, and I still have some videos there on the site/account, but I have no control whatsoever over them now. Someone's being sold a bill of good with this deal when a page passes for customer service.
Makes you wonder if the people shelling out 200-million for a website even bother to test-drive, personally, the product before they spend so wildly. Or will the new owners go in and make it all better? They'd better hurry before others get as frustrated as I was that one night.
UPDATE: Just now managed to find a timely MetaCafe blog. Not from their own site, but by Googling Metacafe. WTF's with that?
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1 comment:
Hi,
I'm sorry to see you had such a terrible experience. The blog and the forums are all accessible from each page of the Metacafe website.
A video that is not part of Producer Rewards can be delete by the user at any time. If it is part of Producer Rewards, then you need to email us, and we have three email addresses for different purposes. A link to the support contact forum appears on every page as well.
As for the thumbnail, at this moment the user cannot edit it themselves, however by emailing us we can change it for you.
Again, I'm sorry that your experience was so negative. If there is anything I can do to help you correct it, please let me know. You already have my email address.
Best of luck in everything.
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