Metacafe Collects $30 Million In Funding

In the land of online video, YouTube is king – there’s no doubting that.  But Metacafe just received some funding, and if $30 million can buy just 0.49 percent of the market, the site may move from eighth place to sixth.

That’s what some Hitwise data suggests, anyway, and investors such as Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures, which contributed to the $30 million, are surely hoping such a change will take place.

“Over the past four years Metacafe has built a large and global audience, which has grown quite significantly throughout 2007,” stated Tom Goodrich, a partner at DAG Ventures.  “We expect the growth to continue as Metacafe rolls out new ways of tapping its community to customize the viewing experience for audience members in different regions around the world.”

Goodrich, by the way, is using “we” in a different sense than you might expect – thanks to the funding round, he and Richard de Silva (of Highland Capital Partners) will join Metacafe’s board of directors.

Anyway, video sites Break.com and Veoh (currently sixth and seventh, respectively) are Metacafe’s most likely victims.  MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video, MySpaceTV, and YouTube complete the climb to the top, but Metacafe would need a lot more help to take on those competitors.

Hat tip to VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.