Revver

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

~ the goodbye ~

revver never reached my orbit. i knew the name from techcrunch coverage on ttnet broadband in the university years, filed under "US indie video creator category i do not have access to". the ad-share model was the thing everyone wrote about, and by the time i was reading those posts revver was already broken in a way the posts did not know yet.

the founding story is clean. may 2005, three founders in los angeles: steven starr, ian clarke, oliver luckett. they wanted to solve a problem that did not exist yet, which was how creators would get paid on a video platform. youtube launched the same year and would not turn on adsense integration until 2007. revver launched publicly at the end of october 2005 with the deal already built in: your video carries a revtag, revver sells the ad slot before and after the video, you take fifty percent of what the ad slot pays, revver takes twenty-five percent, the affiliate who promoted the video takes the other twenty-five.

lonelygirl15 signed a promotional deal in 2006 back when lonelygirl15 was one of the biggest scripted-fiction accounts on the web. screwattack and that guy with the glasses uploaded their libraries because the numbers looked real. by 2007 revver had crossed the first million dollars paid out to creators, which the press-release industry treated as vindication of the whole model.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the model ~

the revtag was the technical piece nobody else had. every video carried a small trailing frame that revver used to attribute plays across the sites the video ended up on. you could embed a revver video on your own blog and the ad would still count. the affiliate share was designed exactly for that: someone else embedding your work paid them twenty-five percent because they had contributed the audience. this is what everyone now calls "creator economy plumbing", worked out in 2005 by a startup that would not survive to see anyone use the word.

~ the decline ~

liveuniverse bought revver in february 2008 for five million dollars. liveuniverse was brad greenspan's post-myspace holding company, which by 2008 was already the wrong signal about a startup exit. within months the payments to creators stopped arriving. screwattack posted publicly that liveuniverse owed them a lot of money. that guy with the glasses did the same. both moved their libraries to blip.tv. the creators who had made the platform useful in the first place walked out with their audiences, and the whole model turned into a set of embed codes still serving ads for a company that had stopped paying anyone.

~ what remains ~

the site went dark on 20 august 2011. no announcement, no export path, no farewell letter. someone at liveuniverse decided the hosting bill was not worth paying anymore and the domain stopped serving. what revver left was the shape of the deal, the fifty-fifty split and the per-video attribution tag, both of which youtube would arrive at from a different angle by 2007 and then generalize across the whole industry. the historical irony is that revver's death came from an acquirer who could not run it, not from a market that did not want it. the market wanted exactly what revver had built. it just wanted it from someone who would pay on time.

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