Revver Is In Trouble
Looks like is under some hard times as reported by this CNET. The company based out of LA raised around $13M during the crazy Internet video boom in 2006. Now it’s having a fire sale and trying to sell for $300-500K plus $1M in debt, OUCH! Why do I care? I care because at one time I thought their model was actually pretty cool and I downloaded and integrated their Wordpress plugin.
Their WP plugin allowed a blogger to embed videos from Revver on his site and also allowed subscribers to the blog to upload their own videos that could be used in the comments section. The best part of this is that all of the revenue generated from embedded ads was shared. One potential problem I think I see with what might seem like a brilliant idea was the actual split:
- 40% for the creator
- 20% for the sharer (the person who embeds the ad)
- 40% for Revver
So here is the problem. Revver is taking a pretty hefty cut to be just yet another technology provider. I mean there are other platforms that individuals could use where they could a significantly larger slice of the pie; Blip.tv comes to mind. I guess this is an unfortunate side effect of taking all that money. Blip also secured a funding of an undisclosed amount, but for some reason they seem to be doing OK. When are these Internet firms going to learn that you live and die by the performance of your sales team. There are sales teams out there selling 1K eyeballs a day at $20 CPM.
My advice to Revver… if you still have your developers package up your tech so that it can be hosted on Amazon EC2 or a couple of DV servers at MediaTemple. Make it easy for startups and large companies to take your tech to add video to whatever offerings they have in the works in their own data centers. Sell that bad boy with support. Make it easy for bloggers/vloggers to be able to control their own data and distribute it. Basically rent video lockers in your data center and also sell lockers (software licenses) to larger players. It’s all about razor blades at this point. Look at Ning.
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