NEW YORK YouTube competitors look to undermine the video sharing site’s success by courting the most popular amateur auteurs with the promise of a payday.
YouTube, which serves 100 million videos a day and spends a reported $1 million per month in bandwidth costs, does not compensate the lucky few who take off within the community.
Upstart Revver hopes to change that. It is attaching static ads to user-created videos, allowing creators to make money anytime the ads are clicked, whether they are shown on Revver’s site or elsewhere on the Web. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz made $33,000, thanks to the Revver ads on their videos that were viewed 7.3 million times, mostly on sites other than Revver.
Break.com, a user video site geared to young males, also hopes to put a dent in YouTube by offering up to $1,000 for videos that appear on its site. Other social media sites are flirting with the idea of paying popular users. AOL’s Netscape social news site recently started paying top contributors. Social network Panjea shares ad revenue from visitors to users’ profile pages.
The move to reward talented and popular creators is natural, said Steven Starr, CEO of Revver, which today is launching its site as a marketplace to match video creators and advertisers. Advertisers will be able to browse content areas for content they wish to advertise with, and creators get the option of rejecting ads for their videos.
For now, however, YouTube dominates online video viewership for amateur clips. It drew 31 million visitors in July, making it the No. 1 video site. While Revver trumpets its distributed model that attaches ads to videos no matter where they appear, it is not able to show them on YouTube or Google’s video service, both of which strip out the Revver software used to show the ads, Starr said.
“There is an opportunity for the creator to get paid and the presenter to get paid that is quite lost on the large destination sites currently,” said Starr, who declined to comment further on the practice at the sites.
Starr believes YouTube will not necessarily dominate user-generated video in the future. A key part of Revver’s strategy is to not only compensate the creators of videos but also the distributors. The company is starting a syndication system that will allow anyone to create their own mini-YouTubes, also sharing in revenue generated from clicked ads. They will receive a cut of the revenue generated if they help distribute videos, whether through a custom-built Web site, their MySpace account or e-mail.
“I’m betting on the consumer wanting to collect and redistribute video,” Starr said.
Over 50,000 videos have been uploaded to Revver, according to Starr, generating click-through rates of 3-4 percent. It has already recruited a handful of popular video bloggers to its platform, including Ze Frank and Ask a Ninja. Ze Frank has made about $14,000 from the ads shown with his videos, according to Revver.
Microsoft, American Apparel and MTV have been among the first advertisers to use Revver’s service.
Revver said it would soon expand its ad options to include pre-roll and post-roll video ads, with content creators allowed to choose the type of ads attached to their content.
Revver Tempts YouTubers With Money
