Revver Making Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid Deadpool?

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1. jackmayhofferr
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

   Wowsers

   Bubble 2.0. Hard to monetize UCG

2. Josiah
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:11 pm

   I wonder what this means for revenue sharing in general on video/social sites?

   Anyone know how Metacafe is doing? I know they share revenue via the ‘producer rewards’ program.

   I wonder if this will cause GooTube to put the brakes on opening up their revenue programs.

3. lawrence
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:18 pm

   i love hearing/reading about failed VC ventures, it’s nice to see the glass half-empty every-so-often

4. john
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

   who needs them? you already got youtube, that’s enough, a porn clone, I can see it happening, but revver, what’s so special about them?

5. harold
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

   They also have over $1m in debt, so the real asking price is probably closer to $2m.

6. No Surprise
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

   UGC is problematic with high risk capital (VC money). If Revver had built an audience, and maintained a core team of developers, they likely could have survived using traditional display and contextual advertising, combined with some well targeted sponsorships and promotions. Once the VC’s came into the mix, the soup was ruined. There is still much upside to video on the web, the waters are rough, but can be navigated.

7. Spez Smartman
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

   the end of the bubble?

   everyone wants to meet a VC and get seed funding — to me this is a huge problem. When you sign your soul over to a VC you also sign over the domain name and everything under it. When the VC loses interest or if the site M&A’s with another site and then the new parent company decides to close it down in 6 months you are left with nothing.

   This American fascination with money, power and greed is destroying the internet as we know it.

   I wish there were more “mom and pop” websites out there with owners who aren’t so concerned about getting acquired.

   http:www.gabbr.com

8. scott
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

   n% of 0 is still 0

   Good idea, but like many ventures, cart before horse?

   Good luck Revver.

9. Jason Sperske
   

   February 6th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

   I think the model of Revver works great (or can work great) it is just a low margin business and you need scale to make any real money. Think about the cost and complexity of revenue negotiations for TV or Movies, if you can create a flexible model that can pay $500 to the next evolution of the Dance guy, while paying $5+ mil to a online only version of Lost (numbers obviously pulled from ass) then you can tap into that long tail of content creation while provided enough of opportunity to attract unrecognized genius.

   This is in effect what Google is doing (how YouTube the site is a great destination of all kinds of content, while YouTube the brand is being extended to CNN, Davos, iPhone, any website that allows embedding) As a content creator (which I am not) I can know that YouTube is not just a channel but a fully fleshed out structure that can connect me with sponsors and all the while track my popularity and even connect me with unreached audiences automatically though the “Related Videos” functionality. Revver did good work, but their ideas were not defensible, and so they will likely live on as a foot note.

10. Marizpan from Toledo
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    unwinding 2.0

    coming soon, stay tuned

11. verily
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    what’s so special about revver is two things - one, the revenue share, about as democratic a model as it gets (google totally botched that by offering a crummy share just to their pet projects, imo), and two, the ad model, way ahead of its time. it is hard to get advertisers who are just now sort of getting the idea of banner ads to get used to the idea of it. especially when they find out that you can embed a video pretty much anywhere and they have no control over where that ad is shown; it’s attached to the content, not to the page it’s embedded on, and advertisers don’t like not being in control. they were never able to attract advertisers like they had hoped. sucks, because their team is first-rate. goes to show you that awesome ideas and good execution don’t always win when there’s youtube, the garbage dump of the internet, to pick through.

12. AK
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    $12.7M in funding …. cant even get $300-500k ??

    kinda scary story especially for techies like me who want to clone successfull ideas

13. Pat Hawks
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    YouTube = dump of the internet?
    I seem to remember hearing about that somewhere else. Something about a series of tubes?

14. techcrunchreader
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    I think we’ll see more of these companies (ie with huge financing, huge burn rate, little or nonexistent earnings) in the dead pool.

    It’s a perfect example of a “raise $X million, with a post-money valuation of $Y million” that didn’t make sense in the first place.

    Revver raised $12M… now on sale for $500 000 with a $1M debt.

    Even if you are able to raise VC money, it does not mean that you can sell your company at the $Y million valuation that was calculated. This pre-post money valuation exercice is useless.

    YouTube sold for $1.65 B. That’s an exception. They were spending a lot of money on bandwidth costs and were not profitable. Google saw an opportunity that they thought they will be able to monetize. They were one of the few that could afford the losses temporarily.

    Unfortunately Revver had a good concept but too many employees (at least 14 now) and not enought revenues to sustain itself.

15. Travis
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

    Revver - being basically the first to the market in this general area had one huge flaw. No marketing. While some of their videos were “viral” they had already undergone that title on other, higher traffic websites. The beauty behind YouTube for a lot of people was that it was clean and easy to use, and they actually pushed themselves out there a little bit. Before the last couple revisions of Revvers site, it was very difficult to just aimlessly browse, which in turn would drive up page views. I didn’t hear about the site until about a year ago or so. IMO the site now is where it should have been 2 or 3 years ago in which case it would have had a fighting chance to be one of the top video sites on the web.
    Agreed that volume is key in that type of business, too bad this one is struggling along. Perhaps a risk taking investor and a good marketing team could get this site back on its feet?

16. Jenkins
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    Folks,

    Revver was a fundamentally flawed idea which is why they failed. They actually had some good people there. There’s just no serious, scalable business model for user-generated video. You get in trouble when you think advertisers will fund all business models.

17. Jollyjo
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    2007 was touted as the year online video/internet tv would come into it’s own as the “next big thing”.

    “One swallow does not a summer make” but at this early stage if Revver with over $12 million in funding can’t make it, maybe there is nothing big about this online video/internet tv thing after all.

18. Glen Barnes
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    “who needs them? you already got youtube, that’s enough, a porn clone, I can see it happening, but revver, what’s so special about them?”

    Revver had a couple things a) The video’s could be longer than 10 minutes and b) the quality was way better. I have moved to Vimeo now after a friend suggested it and the quality is just as good as Revver.

19. browse
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    $500k? That’s a second mortgage. You’d think a bigger player would buy them just for audience alone at that price.

20. Bob Ngu
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    $12.7M? I never understood the need for such extravagance for a Web 2.0 site. My site is self-funded and running on $25/month hosting fee, that’s it, that’s my run rate.

21. AW
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    @20:

    No surprise there, your website damn near brought Firefox to its knees. Plus about six DivX “could not play video1111!!!” pop-ups that were crammed into my face.

    I have to congratulate you for almost crashing Firefox though. It’s been about 3 months since a website did that.

22. AW
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

    I had no idea Revver was doing so bad — it always seemed like such a good concept, but when I really think about it, I never saw the player embedded in any blogs, and I never hit Revver ‘organically’ because nobody was linking to it.

23. Wes
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    I think its a crowded space, hence no interest. The $1m debt justifies the low price.

24. Bob Ngu
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    @AW

    My site does not host videos, my users link to them, so I don’t have any control over the quality and availability of the videos. Those Divx errors are thrown by the Divx plugin, not my site. If I wish, tt would be simple enough for me to remove all the Divx videos to get rid of those errors. I won’t do that because the Divx videos play fine for many people. It works just fine on my FF (both 2.0 and 3.0 beta), so it seems like your FF installation has other problems.

25. Rev This
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    Revver was doomed to fail from the get-go, because it presented a false scenario to online video makers — “Your videos are great, but YouTube is not paying, and we are, so come on over and put your videos on our site and make some serious dough.”

    The reality is this: a video that gets million of hits on YouTube is unlikely to repeat that popularity on any other video sites because of the enormous reach only YouTube can provide.

    In short, YouTube sucks out all the oxygen in the video space.

    There are many reasons to that. First and foremost, YouTube creates a wealth of functionalities that no other video sites can match, and secondly, Google, its parent comany, has figured out a way to boost YouTube’s standing beyond just a place for people to post their rants and shticks. Today, YouTube is a place where heads of states can create their fancy sites, right along a channel where some 15-year-old posts his skateboard adventures.

    And get this: when the thousands of people who post videos to talk about the upcoming presidential election, none of them are thinking about making money from their videos.

26. Justin
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

    I’m very surprised at this news. I know several video makers that generated good money from Revver. Not huge numbers, but solid “3 digit” monthly checks came in, which is nice supplemental income for people just making enthusiast videos.

27. Joe T.
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    How many of these video “discovery” sites do there have to be?

    Sooner or later, some industry pundit is gonna point out that 3/4 of all these Web 2.0 startups are just shoveling around videos and insipid content from one person to another, generating second-hand “entertainment”, useless games and pointless social networking.

    All of this stuff is non-productive and doesn’t increase anyone’s GDP. There is absolutely no productivity involved. We’re building all these sites, they’re getting millions in funding, and all they’re doing is increasing people’s non-productivity.

    Sooner or later, just as with the subprime crisis, the economic chickens are gonna come home to roost, and it won’t be pretty.

28. Isaac
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    I’m not sure Live U will see Revver as a good fit. Although Revver may have some traffic, what most of these startups need is Revenue.

    If Revver is falling apart the sales team is likely 1st out or was never there at all.

    Live U has a ton of traffic, but not much on the Revenue side, although I would never under estimate BG when it comes to buying a property.

29. Jon carder
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm

    Anyone know how much organic traffic they are getting? That could help justify the price to interested buyers.

30. No Surprise
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    @27… Joe T.,

    “Sooner or later, just as with the subprime crisis, the economic chickens are gonna come home to roost, and it won’t be pretty.”

    LMAO!!! This is classic - i’ll share with some b school friends (Disclosure: Not recent - back when developing a business plan and model was required first.)

    :-))

31. Jeff Tayler
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    Joe T has it exactly.

    The business GDP of the US economy is hundreds of billions. Facebook and Youtube siphon off a few percentage points of this–maybe 1% or 2% of this every day and boom–you now have a a facebook valued at $15 Billion. With all of this advertising revenue generated during work!

    This whole value creation bit is just stealing from one bucket–work productivity–and putting into another bucket–worker unproductivity.

32. Dan
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    Amazing! They must have some scary tech-costs if no one is willing to fork up $400-$500k for a site with a 3k alexa and obvious potential..

33. User447
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:39 pm

    @12,

    Sounds a lot like Edgeio to me.

34. Alize
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Revver over moderated their video submissions so the real issue is that most of their content was dull.

35. SanFranGuru
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 6:25 pm

    Revver’s failure is part flawed business model, part flawed management. They had a good concept back in ‘06 when they first came on my radar, and with the right management, could have generated traffic, while developing an ad model that the industry could adopt. Instead they focused on making the amateur video producers happy, and didn’t think about what pays the bills, and from what I hear from a source on the inside, their CEO didn’t know the internet business when he started last year, and still hasn’t caught up.

36. Does techcrunch attack startups?
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

    So does techcrunch write bad stuff about deadpool startups?

37. damon
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    youch

38. Evan
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    Well, we at HungryFlix.com wish Revver all the best. I can’t see them just jumping into the deadpool. Someone will pick them up.

    We still believe that there is an audience for great indie content and that the content providers deserve to be compensated–either via revenue share or promotion.

    But it is difficult to get through and get noticed to the YouTube masses.

39. Maya
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    Indians, Why using revver when we have Movie MAZIC. Share your favorite audios/videos/pics/movies and many more with your friends like this one http://moviemazic.com/showuser.php?id=61

40. Travell Perkins
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 10:21 pm

    IF they haven’t fired all the developers they can still turn things around. I go more into this in a post I added today. I like them because I tried out their WP plugin on an environmental aggregator I run @ EcoEgg.org.

41. Dyde
    

    February 6th, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    VCs who gave them the $ have to be shaking now. Last couple of months we saw millions being poured into video startups. So this is going to be a red herring for VC industry.

42. plop
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 2:05 am

    What I find interesting is that one minute TC are raving about reever then the next they say ha ha their fckued. TC lacks a deepened insight into the web2.0 terrain and real business economics.

    TC instead parades about who just got funding for such and such. Let me give you a tip, you find companies who have no funding, 30USD a month burn rates and who are sitting on the next big thing, even if it won’t change the world but they will be able to grow into little profitable business they are likely to be more ‘interesting’ than these up and down stories of the speculators in this latest gold rush.

43. Still Rob G
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    Revver is still on the myspace banned list, I wonder how much that affected their viability?
    Youtube escaped by being huge, photobucket escaped the ban list when it accepted myspace’s offer to buy them, imeem is still thriving despite being banned.

44. Paul Nilsen
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 10:10 am

    From the outside looking in, it appeared that the Revver business was solid but I agree that you can’t hang your hat on advertising alone in the video space.

    It seems that competitors like Blip.TV and Brightcove have differentiated by trying to emulate TV networks and promote and cultivate an environment for exceptional content as opposed to serving as a platform for the masses.

45. Sean
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 10:50 am

    I like using Revver, but their embed funtionality isn’t the greatest. Either way I’d like to see them stick around.

46. Sean McMenemy
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    I’m sorry but the real problem is their advertising. The player is great far better than youtube. After trying it out I think the player is great. But then to not have any control over the ads or how they are displayed was a turn off, a BIG TURN OFF. As a content creator I see the need for the advertising to be there to support my products. I just want it to be better. But their execution of it was way off. It’s almost looked like a Bloomberg Channel… That’s crazy I didn’t spend all that time making a shot or graphics for it to be covered up by ringtone ads… When are people going to learn from Google? Let my tags drive the adds!

    Here’s what I would do. Okay these are just off the top of my head.
    1. Be Relevant. Let my TAGS drive the adds… If no tags match advertisers start looking for those advertisers. Then you might have a better chance of advertisers getting what they pay for and consumers buying based on their interests. Heck some people might get their own advertisers.

    2. Don’t cover the video. Build text stream into the player, it could be on the bottom or top on the side… maybe the account holder could figure out where they wanted it. OPTIONS!

    3. Let the Account holder choose who they want to sponsor their video feed.

    4. How about a fee to remove adds all together? Keep in mind this is the day of free shipping and website hosting costing 8 bucks a month. These sites take a way a lot of the headache of not having to deal with the technical stuff of uploading and converting and making sure everyone viewing your website has the right player, that is worth something. How much would you pay for more options like video size, formats, thumbnail control, tracking, embedding, ads that merge with your content, bandwidth not on your main site?

    5. Let me try it free and when I see other option there like those I’d be willing to pay for it.

    How hard would any of that stuff been to do? Not very… All of these players have the same basic model when are any of them going to start thinking outside the box?

47. Alx Klive
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    Wow. If this turns out to be true, I’m sorry to hear it.

    I agree with Sean McMenemy above…

    “5. Let me try it free and when I see other option there like those I’d be willing to pay for it.”

    SmugMug is a great example of execution of this in the photo space. It’s our plan with WorldTV.

48. tim
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    with the kind of uniques they are getting, they are worth a lot more.

49. S. Whitmore
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 4:02 pm

    Wow, all this commentary about Revver and not one word about the API that allows people to build a video site with Revver doing all the heavy lifting. I can see there’s a deep level of understanding of Revver here… (not). BTW, if you do some searching you’ll find “Revver is going down” rumors that are about a year old. Maybe it’s time to quit harping on Revver and come up with a new rumor?

50. Helen
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

    S. Whitmore, Revver’s API to build a video site was a license to become a Revver ad affiliate… But if you want a true API that allows you to build an independent video site, you have to use an API solution like the one offered by VideoBloom.com. Who cares about ads that are forced on you as a publisher?

51. S. Whitmore
    

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    Helen, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. What does “ad affiliate” mean? If it means that you can share Revverized videos and make money from it, then anybody could be an “ad affiliate” for Revver, no API or programmer knowledge necessary. The API I’m talking about is the one documented in their Developers section, which I’ve used on a couple sites and is not for mainstream cut-and-paste-HTML users. As for “ads being forced on you” — um, that’s a service, not a problem, since Revver is not only doing the heavy lifting for video hosting and delivery but also for arranging ad contracts that pay YOU (and Revver, obviously).

52. JB
    

    February 8th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    1. So will Revver continue to pay it content creators? I just joined as one last week!

    2. My biggest question in the online video world is the copyright issue. Obviously Revver is hardcore about not breaking any audio copyrights. Is there a list of audio samples that they do allow. I read somewhere that any musical recording is copyrighted. Is this true at all? What about Fair Use?

    Youtube’s advantage over Revver is that their site is filled with music and videos that are copyrighted. Even content creators that they pay (TheHill88 for example) will include copyrighted audio in their vids. There are around 40,000 videos of people dancing to the Soldier Boy. The Super Bowl Catch, Eli on Letterman, All of Frank Caliendo… It’s all there within 1 day of it happening. There is no way to stop it, and the stuff is wildly popular. What ever happened to that lawsuit against Youtube?

53. S. Whitmore
    

    February 8th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    JB: Music that you can use includes music you create, public domain music (you’ll need some sort of proof that it’s public domain), music you pay for, or music that is published under an open license such as a Creative Commons license. Search the forums there for some links, they’re not coming to mind at hand, but there are entire sites devoted to CC-licensed music. The only way that you’ll be able to use commercially-popular music is if you can prove to them that you’ve obtained (bought) the right (license) to do so. The fact that Revver is so solid about copyright is one of the reasons I like them so much — but, as you point out, it’s also a reason they’ll never “catch up” to infringement-filled YouTube (but that’s not their main purpose anyway).

54. Jake mason
    

    February 12th, 2008 at 12:34 am

    @48… Tim, do you know how many uniques they are getting? surely this will plug into a ‘how much is a website worth according to traffic’ spreadheet and come up with a number.

    In my opinion more focus was required for the advertisers… they are the ones paying the bills, and are the ones who should get attention. Not the producers. Advertisers aren’t ready to spend on this as it is new. the model is viable, but needs time

55. Henry
    

    February 21st, 2008 at 12:25 am

    Revver’s business model is solid, they were effectively hedging against a copy write lawsuit, but the monster lawsuit that was forecast to cripple YouTube never really (or has yet) to materialize. …while they have lost some quality employees over the last year, some one should still see the value in this company and swoop it up…

56. Henry
    

    February 21st, 2008 at 12:26 am

    http://www.footyCS.com