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 . Oliver Luckett departed the company in late 2006.

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. Shortly prior to its relaunch, around 20,000 videos were available on the site . By mid-October this number had almost quintupled to 100,000 videos . 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.

On November 29, Verizon Wireless and Revver announced a deal to make some Revver videos available to subscribers of Verizon's V CAST service. The deal was announced the day after a similar deal with YouTube. On V CAST, Revver videos will not contain advertisements at the end, but Revver plans to share half of the revenue from the venture with content creators .

Revver was acquired by LiveUniverse for $5 million in February 2008 .

Revenue model

Advert: date=October 2008 Revver is the first video-sharing website to monetize user-generated content through advertising and share ad revenue with the creator.Fact: date=February 2007 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 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.