Revver
Revver is a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and shares all ad revenue 50/50 with the Creators. Videos can be displayed, downloaded and shared across the web in either Apple QuickTime or FLV format.
History
Revver was founded by Steven Starr, Ian Clarke, and Oliver Luckett in 2004, and is currently based in Los Angeles. The website itself, however, did not launch until November 2005. The company has received investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards, William R. Hearst, III, Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner Broadcasting.
The current version of the site, Revver 1.0 was released in September 2006. This included a new design, user dashboard, a web based uploader and Flash as a video delivery method. Around the same time as the release, prominent YouTube user lonelygirl15 signed a promotional deal with Revver.
The site has grown slowly in popularity. Shorly prior to its relaunch, only around 20,000 videos were available on the site. By mid-October this number had almost quintupled to 100,000. The site's most popular user, a creator of videos mixing Mentos into Coke, had generated around $30,000.
Revver released its API in September, 2006. Developers using the API can build a website with all the features on Revver.com and have complete access to the full Revver library of videos.
Revenue Model
Revver is one of the first video-sharing websites to monetize user-generated content through advertising. Revver's system is often compared to Google's Adwords, but for video rather than websites.
The key technology behind Revver is the RevTag, a tracking tag that is attached to videos that users upload. The RevTag automatically displays a static, clickable advert at the end of each video. When viewers click on it, the advertiser is charged and the advertising fee is split between the video creator and Revver.
RevTags are trackable across the web so users are encouraged to share Revver videos as widely as possible. Since the RevTag is part of the video file itself (thanks to the interactivity made possible by Flash-based video players and by the QuickTime format), the technology works no matter where the video file is hosted or displayed, be it at Revver.com, at another website, or in a user's hard drive or portable video player. Therefore Revver's monetization of the video is not hampered by the downloading or sharing of the video file by users.
The only circumstance where the RevTag can fail to load an ad, or to register an ad click, is if the device playing the video is not connected to the internet, in which case a default "Brought to you by Revver" message is shown at the end. Of course, if the video file is transcoded into a different format (such as by uploading it to YouTube or Google Video, or by running it through a program that changes the format of the video file, e.g. into MPEG or RealPlayer), then the RevTag would almost certainly be lost.
The Revver website provides tools for sharing including RSS, podcasting, and embeddable FLV or QuickTime players. This minimizes any added benefits of transcoding. Revver thus makes it easy for creators and fans to embed the video anywhere while still in its original RevTagged version.
Users are further encouraged to share by Revver's affiliate program. An Affiliate is a user who helps to promote their favorite videos (or any videos they believe will become popular), be it through email, sneakernet, peer-to-peer sharing, or posting on their own website or on social-networking webpages. Revver affiliates earn 20% of ad revenue for sharing videos. The remaining revenue for each video is split 50/50 between the video creator and Revver. This is possible because the RevTag in a video file that is promoted by an affiliate contains information not only about the video being played but also about the affiliate.
Creators are able to restrict what kinds of advertisements may be placed at the end of their videos. Similarly, advertisers may choose to request that their ads be shown in videos of certain categories (such as videos that are most popular on certain websites), thus allowing them to better target their desired demographics.
To enable lawful sharing of Revver vidoes, the Revver upload license allows for redistribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Creative Commons License.
Criticism
One of the complaints about Revver is viewer privacy − in order to download the ad, the video file must contact the Revver servers with information about the video (at least the category, possibly the video ID). In the words of CEO Steven Starr, 'everywhere it's going, it's saying "hey, I'm being watched"' (Oct 17th, 2006 at USC). This conflicts with viewers' privacy expectations when they're playing the video from a source that's not normally tracked (such as their own hard disks).
