Revver up for the Video Sharing Races

eva boogies at derby day
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Melbourne Cup Day here, which is part of our Spring Carnival, but for young hipsters and TV stars that get paid large bounties for turning up and judging fashion on the fields, Derby Day is it : 130k beautiful people in one place. So... I'm not a full contrarian on companies aiming to be the 'flickr of video' ala youtube, and now revver, who have received funding from the usual suspects - draper, bessemer etc. With smaller rounds these days, Im guessing VC's could actually invest in more companies minus the fact that they can only timewise manage so many investments, and that with smaller rounds, come more imitators, which in a way might put you off investing in certain segments. But I'm interested in this video sharing space because the penetration of video recording devices only increases as they get cheaper, smaller and integrated into standard phones. But how many of us are able to get our family videos or more adventurous content onto the internet, tagged, shared within my networks and globally, as well as possibly make money if this is something more commercial ala a Suicide Girls operation. Revver's insert an ad, track it and insert another ad as it pinballs around the Internet sounds like a nice centralised decentralised tracking and revenue earning tool. Audience is everything though, so it will be interesting to see who gets critical mass mindshare leadership in this segment, as replicating the network effect (as skype's competitors know) isnt an easy task. Another sidepoint is these companies may face a similar perspective challeng as Steve Jobs did on video relative to audio for the Ipod; Would you rather go to a site that had image and video, or just video for example. Do you want professional or amateur content or both ? I'm not sure this will play out exactly as flickr did with user generated or sourced pictures. At the moment the video on these sites is largely 'amateur', when I'm a bit more of a fan of the ifilm.com (recently acquired) approach for the daily viral hits that bounce around inboxes each morning. For that, you need the X Factor and studio deals, which is a bit different from uploading the family video. (not that i want to sound like barry diller) In many way these questions of who owns the content, who profits from it, and what mix of content do users want, and how do they want to subscribe and share it are fundamental to most of these 1.0 + 1.0 businesses. Anyway, I like Revver's monetisation model, a stark contrast to their image based forefathers. Bets on everyone, for the leader in video sharing ??

"Revver is an equal partnership -- you earn what we earn.The income from RevTags is always split 50-50 between Revver and the creator. (If a partner site delivers the video to their users, we split the income after subtracting an affiliate commission.)..Your video will appear on Revver.com and you can link to it or send it to friends. Every time someone clicks on the ad, you'll earn money. And no matter where your video travels, the RevTag goes with it... Affiliates: Offer Video, Earn Money - If your website is a Revver affiliate, you will earn money anytime someone clicks on a RevTag video that's hosted on your site. Affiliates earn a 20% affiliate commission for each click."