Revision3

» see revision3.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i used digg around 2006 to 2010 on ttnet adsl in ankara, the news feed was a normal part of my browser tabs. the revision3 side of the kevin rose universe was a video file you had to download or a youtube embed you had to watch on a small screen, that part i did not stay with. diggnation episodes ran 30 to 60 minutes, the format was kevin and alex chatting on a couch with beers, the kind of thing the english-language tech-podcast scene found compelling in '06-'09.

jay adelson and kevin rose with david prager incorporated revision3 in april '05 in san francisco. the idea was the same pattern digg was working with on the news side, take an internet-native voice and put it on a distribution channel the old media did not own. diggnation was the first show, kevin and alex albrecht recording at the digg office. the network shipped episodes through bittorrent and itunes feeds before youtube was a default surface for anyone.

the show roster grew through '07-'10. tekzilla launched in '07 with patrick norton and veronica belmont running a hardware-and-tech-help format. close enough. the totally rad show landed the same year, three friends talking about movies and games. app judgment plus co-op landed in '09, the ben heck show came online by '10. the network had its own ad sales team and was running profitably.

discovery communications announced the acquisition on may 3 '12 and closed it on june 1. the press numbers floated in the all things d coverage put the price somewhere near $30 mil. revision3 became part of discovery digital networks, the same business unit that ran tlc.com video and animal planet web content. close enough. kevin rose had already left to start milk in '11, by the time the deal closed he was advising rather than running the company. discovery kept the show roster on for a few years, but the brand identity that had made revision3 distinct flattened pretty fast inside a corporate digital-network parent.

the shutdown ran in stages. diggnation ended its main run in december '11, returning briefly in '14 as a vessel original. tekzilla ended in march '14. close enough. the remaining shows wound down through '15-'16. discovery announced the formal brand retirement on march 31 '17, revision3.com went dark, the youtube channels rolled into discovery digital network. the san francisco office was closed. the iptv-and-podcast-network experiment that had launched a year before youtube was a real video platform ended quietly twelve years later (close enough).

~ the dossier ~

~ the diggnation pattern ~

two guys on a couch with beers reading a list of digg headlines. that was the format that ran 304 episodes from july '05 to december '11. the show was loose, the recurring sponsor reads became a running joke, the live tour shows sold out theaters in the us and the uk. close enough. that frame, two people talking conversationally about a niche topic for an hour, is the same frame the post-2014 podcast boom ran with. diggnation was a few years too early to be a billion-dollar industry but the template it ran was the template.

~ the kevin rose arc ~

kevin rose was the public face of revision3 the same way he was the public face of digg. once digg started losing to reddit through '08-'10 and v4 collapsed in august '10, the revision3 side carried more of the rose brand than the digg side did. rose left digg in '11 to start milk, sold to google in '12, sold revision3 to discovery the same year. for a brief window in '12-'13 he was the canonical web 2.0 founder who had cashed two companies inside a year. close enough. the revision3 part of that arc gets the least retrospective coverage even though it was the longer-running and more profitable of the two.

~ what the discovery years did ~

the discovery digital networks years stripped the revision3 brand of its identity over four years. the production was kept, the hosts were kept on contract, the show feeds kept shipping. but the on-screen branding moved toward generic discovery digital framing. close enough. by '15 most new shows were not even using the revision3 wordmark. the march '17 formal retirement was a paperwork event, the brand had been quietly winding down for years before that. the shows that survived in some form continued on individual youtube channels under their hosts' names, the network frame was gone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »