What is Going on with Revver?? Should I be replacing my players???

If you've been in the game for a while you probably have a lot of Revver players out there in an ever increasingly vain attempt to earn money. Those days seem a distant memory. For the first time that we know of, EVERYTHING Revver went down. Quicktime, website, embedded players, forum, absolutely everything was down.

Logging in today, the site and players were back up and everything was working faster than it has in a while. With a "Scheduled Maintenance" message across every page. Maybe a revival is in the making, but the landscape is so changed you have to wonder what kind of business model they would be able to put together. The old one failed under its own success.

Two years ago Revver was the way of making money with video, offering $0.30 or more per click. I bet the spammers, scrapers and fraudsters had fun with that, but the problem was that their advertising inventory was skyrocketing while their advertiser's expectations where falling. Classic arbitrage collapse. Who wants to buy click ads that don't sell products at the other end.

But what is going on with Revver right now? And should I replace my players? I wish I had an answer for you. Its unlikely that they will be paying anything to content producers that would come close to the company's original vision. Is their technology still Hot. I'd say yes. Their players are solid, their transcoding is pro and they are still one of the few free services to be easily integrated with iTunes.

I don't think you need to feel bad swapping out players on under your control, if you want to do the work. They need to lower their bandwidth for a while, cement new relationships, and figure out a way to go up against the pirating sites on one side, and Hulu on the other.

In the mean times check out these other players:

Vimeo - sweet and simple, great transcoding, HD, and kind community
Dailymotion - Huge and likely to be a round a while, new HD players

Also remember Tubemogul makes video distribution easy, sending out to something like 24 videos sites at once. And analytics to boot :)

Tobemogul Cracks the Definition of a Video View

What is a view? That's been a big question for the past two years. Tubemogul did the research and cracked it.

Check it out:
http://www.tubemogul.com/research/index.php?r=6

Player Review: Revver

Those of you who have been working with Revver’s video player and advertising network, will know how powerful the service’s syndication tools are and the upgraded Revver player puts it back on top of the online video game (at least now that Stage6 has closed its doors). The new player was release a couple of months back, first on their site then on the sites of their content producer’s and syndicators.

Be for we examine the benefits of the new player, its worth mentioning that 2007 was a difficult year on many fronts for Revver. Unable to sell enough advertising to properly service their massive video library, Revver abandoned their sales effort and turned to third party ad networks (first Adbrite, now Google Adsense). At the same time ad value for “video” and video related keywords fell sharply across the web making it very challenging for producer to create a higher standard of short form production.

The new player, and its slick black skin, incorporates a number of functions found in competitor players that greatly increase its viral capabilities. The player now has a “menu” button that provides information on the creator, embed code, email sharing and related videos which can be viewed in a list or on a thumbnail gallery. The player is highly customizable, including the ability to brand the player with your show’s logo. But at the root of it, the Revver player provides the same high quality video you’ve come to expect from this great service.

The complaints about the player are twofold and both relate to the advertising portion of the Revver network. Ads are now displayed as overlays along the bottom of the player, and at the end in a block of three ads. First, even if your viewer completes the video and sees both the overlay and the post roll adblock, the publisher gets credited for just one impression, not four. The ads are also accompanied with arrow buttons to allow the user the option of viewing more ads, but that also does not result in additional impressions. Second, if Adsense is driving the advertising within Revver videos, then why are those impressions not reported within our Adsense accounts? It is currently impossible to see how one video is doing in relation or user interaction with the advertising, a well developed feature of Adsense.

As a side note, revver has quietly mothballed its podcasting capability. While still offering the service, it is rare that ads are served into iTunes the way they once were. This is likely do to the ongoing debate about the compression formats used, and which should prevail. Web based catchers prefer flash video, while iTunes continues to push its quicktime H.264 iTV compression format. Fortunately video publishers still have a choice to use both formats within Revver driven RSS feeds.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of Internet Video

YouTube - www.youtube.com

The Good - YouTube is the king of traffic and community. It has basic syndication tool with a strong viral player that can be embedded and syndicated.

The Bad - YouTube still doesn't have a revenue vehicle that every content producers can tap into. There is the beginnings of such a development, but its focused on syndicators, not producers. Only US syndicators can access the program by linking their Adsense account to there YouTube accounts. A small number of premium producers have access to the other side of the YouTube ad network as a beta pilot that has continued for over a year.

The Ugly - Pirated content galore, and piles of poorly organized videos makes the whole site a mess. Even with Google's "King of Search" muscle, you can't find anything specific and end up floating around hoping to find stuff.


Revver - www.revver.com

The Good - Revver has the best syndication tools on the market. You can distribute in flash and quicktime over open API generated feeds, javascript and embed code. The ad network does an bottom margin overlay ad and a post slate of ads. This is currently the only open-for-all, 100% legal video and advertising delivery network.

The Bad - Revver's site itself doesn't have much traffic so you'll have to get out there and promote your shows. They have recently added a basic set of social networking features to a newly designed more powerful site, but the site still lacks in the traffic generation department.

The Ugly - Ad revenues have been falling and they have changed the way the revenue is calculated. Now CPM and CPC ads are calculated out across the genre into a eCPM, so everyone shares in less in relation to the number of ad impressions their videos get. You'll need huge numbers to be able to earn a living from the Revver ad network.

Metacafe - www.metacafe.com

The Good - This site had solid community and your videos will get traffic right from the start. You'll get 100 views before the submission process is over. There is no pirated content here, everything is reviewed by real people.

The Bad - Acceptance to the revenue program is based on a user rating system that is tough to crack. You need a rating of 3.0 and 20 000 views.

The Ugly - The community is very aggressive and competitive. Expect to get at least one of your video attacked by way of a nasty comment. The site is also very conservative and racy content gets rejected by the reviewers.

Veoh - www.veoh.com

The Good - If each company had to choose one aspect of the business to focus on, Veoh chose relationship building. They have signed deals with most of mainstream Hollywood and 6 months ago looked like the leader of the "Non-YouTube" contenders in the online video market. They also managed to avoid the kind of law suites that a network with as much pirated content as they have should face.

The Bad - Although Veoh has a decent embedable player, their main business model is a downloaded application player. This is a loosing model pretty much everywhere it's tried. Not only that, Veoh's application player is poorly coded without the courtesy features one would expect like control over the program's use of the Window's Taskbar. Three month's ago, much to the displeasure of pirated video viewers, Voeh switched their embedded players to a five minute preview, that would lead you to a download of that file.

The Ugly - As a result of this major change, the site's traffic has dropped significantly. The site hasn't even begun an advertising supported strategy having put all their money into the "Rent" or "Buy" to watch models.

Stage6 - www.stage6.com

The Good - Stage6 and Divx have the best player on the market. In fact when you upload to YouTube, your best option is to use the DivxHDi format. Its small file size and stable playback makes it a pack leader, but what makes it a star is the thousands of devices (mainly DVD players) that support Divx.

The Bad - The site is weak. Although it looks good it's often slow. On the syndication side it's quite good, so link sites have used it as a backbone for the distribution of pirated television and movies. In recent month's Stage6 has moved against the pirates and copyrighted content is pulled down quickly.

The Ugly - Stage6 has a secret. If you notice at the end of the video they have a clickable post slate with an ad for Divx. The company has not created their own ad network because their main business is licensing Divx to third part hardware manufacturers. Their site claims to be working toward a "Rent" or "Buy" to watch model that won't be successful. When asked if they will release that ad spot for content creators to insert their own advertising, they rejected that as never being an option. They want the sweet spot at the end of the video for themselves but aren't to sure what to do with it.

Results on Binkx Adhoc Network

So the results are in on how the Blinkx Adhoc network operates. Although the process for adding the ads and posting the ad enabled video is simple and easy, there is a major problem with the amount of communication from that goes on between the network and the site while the page is loading, causing a major load time delays.

As for payout, you'll get somewhere between 3 and 4 cents per click. Not bad considering the starting price for advertisers on the network is 5 cents.

Another issue is that some of the video posting sites will actually strip out the ads before displaying the video on their site making it a lot less "viral" than other networks.

All in all, its a interesting development that may be suitable for sites with only one video per page, but is not viable for video centric blogs that will display a number of videos at once.

Blinkx AdHoc a Strong Alternative to Video Ad Insertion

Looking to squeeze a bit more advertising into your shared video offerings. Blinkx has a new easy solution, but does it work?

Blinkx is taking a different approach to their video advertising network. They are auto inserting contextual advertising into the shared embedded video from other hosting sites like YouTube, Revver, and Veoh. The process is so simple. You sign up for an account, which only requires your email address, a password and your paypal email. Then copy and paste the embed code from your favorite video hosting site and presto, Blinkx gives you a new embed code that will drive their advertising. You can choose to have the ads float over the top of the video or above video all together.

Blinkx states that the ads come from a variety of third party advertising networks providing CPM, CPC and CPA advertising, as well as Blinkx's own advertiser network which offers cost-per-click starting at $0.05. They don't say how much of that will end up with the publisher, but we'll find out and let you know in a future post.

On testing, no advertising was presented and it seemed to really slow down the video serving. Of the hosting sites tested only Stage6's embed code failed to sync with Blinkx's processes. Below are examples of the same video hosted on different sites displaying Blinkx advertising.

YouTube:

Revver:

Veoh:

If you notice any bugs when these videos stream, please leave a comment.

Two Big Changes in the World of Video Advertising

So this was a big weekend for online advertising. On Friday Revver announced the start of their pre-roll CPM ad delivery program, and over the weekend Google opened its CPA network to more users including the T-Cast Network.

For those of you who don't know what all the acronyms are all about, don't worry we were all there at some point. CPM is "cost per 1000 impressions" meaning it pays the publisher every time its seen 100 times. CPA is "Cost Per Action" meaning it pays the publisher when the viewer clicks the ad, goes to a site and completes some action. CPA pays better but is harder to convert, while CPM pays poorly but consistently.

Sites like AtomFilms have been using pre-roll ads for years, but with viewer attention spans so soft, Revver went with the video first approach. Pre-roll CPM changes all that.

Revver's pre-roll CPM program is a divergence from its traditional business model and they are going to great lengths to insist that the ads will remain non-obtrusive. The plus side is producers will now be paid every time their video is played (albeit a small amount), this is good news because well over 50% of the time viewers don't watch the video to the end and therefore never see the ad. Hopefully this new product will prop up producer's falling earnings on the network.

Google has been pilot projecting their referral or CPA ad network for years with products like Adsense, Adwords and Firefox, but has now expanded to an impressive array of products to promote on publisher sites.

One major problem with CPA networks like AzoogleAds.com and RockitProfit.com is that promotions are localized geographically and rarely allow international traffic. Google's CPA network takes care of that and provides a rotator for the ads repeated visitors are exposed to different ads. Many offers pay for people signing up for a free account on photo-sharing and dating sites.

Payments on Google's Adsense content network have bottom out making it hard for publishers to continue to run CPC context sensitive ads. Now with the improved Revver and Google ad programs, producers of original video content can monetize their traffic more successfully...or at least that's the promise.

There are some noticeable holes right off the bat. Revver is its classic form launched its program without updated analytics so producers will have no idea how many pre-roll ads are shown or how much of their money is coming from the CPM ads. Not all videos are used for the program, videos under 30 seconds are understandable not used, but no other details are given for video selection.

The Google Referrals network has a bit of a weak interface, the ads lack variety in their creatives, and the ads seem to pay slightly lower than other CPA networks.

Still big changes all around, Revver still hasn't had to content with Google directly, but that day will come. Google's own pre-roll video ad network is known to be in small scale testing, likely several years away from launching to the masses of producers.

Revver the next Google purchase, or maybe Stage6?

Google has build an empire on buying up the best innovations and integrating them into a vast advertising network. Providing free content and making billions for it. In a lot of ways Revver has what Google wants, a better player, CPC based auto insertion ad technology, and a pile of copy-right responsible content.

At T-Cast, we like the Revver model and wish them success. But there are problems with the things as they are. There is still no analytic reporting for video syndication and the revenue from those clicks is not broken down for either the syndicator or the content producer. Value of clicks are falling, but then are still better than most of the adwords content market with pay-per-click of $0.12 to $0.27.

It would seem to be smarter for the content producer to sell their own advertising, and the T-Cast producers asked Stage6's Divx support team for just such an opportunity only to be disappointed with the response. No question that the Divx authoring software is the best encoding software out there for under $50, and the Stage6.com site has proven that the player is post-roll clickable. Content producers could be running their own advertising campaigns off a wide variety of CPC, CPM and CPA advertising networks, and Divx HD quality video would be everywhere. Stage6 could be Revver for the masses.

Google needs to figure this out or it could get away from them. And there are other divx encoders out there. One of these companies has to put internet video syndication and dynamic advertising together before some hacker does.

Content Update: ComedyCaster and DramaCaster

We have added two very exciting shows to our directories. Prom Queen a teenage drama about getting ready for prom night, promises some big surprises for the big night.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

And Snowmen Hunters! A crazy comedy/reality tv spoof will surely teach you a few ways to hurt yourself. Don't try this stuff at home.

Podcasting for Revver Ad Delivery

There is no doubt that podcast and rss distribution can drive a show's viewership, but is it effective ad delivery? RSS tracking from Feedburner.com is a great way to understand your podcast or blog viewership, and revver files are supported by iTunes and most podcast directories which provides a turn key solution to hosting and syndicating video podcasts. But in our experience the powerful distribution combination, does not convert advertising clicks in an effective way.

For our original production, The Retired Porn Producer's Guide to... we have many methods driving viewership.

Podcasting
Our podcasting feed is directed to Episode 5 (the latest episode) of the series, which downloads (or as Revver puts it "views") when the podcast is subscribed to. Roughly 30% of those go on to download another episode and 10% download them all, but in general podcasting drives 30% of our daily viewership. That episode however has performed poorly over the last month with a click through rate of 0.15%.

Adwords Promotion
Our adwords promotion efforts are directed to a landing page where Episode 1 is embedded. This activity drives 40% of our web traffic, which is about 50% of our total embed code traffic. This episode is shorter and designed to bring in viewers in general, and we have already examined episode length in relation to click through rates. The episode converts clicks at 2.5%.

The series averages a click through rate of 1.31%, so you can see podcasting drives traffic but not necessarily advertising revenue.

Producer Tip: Short is King!

If you're a film director you really want to be able to "get your vision out" but there is always that producer standing behind you saying, "do it faster and cheaper". Well if your producing or directing for the internet there is one more demand on that list. Make it short! On the internet short is king.

One of the goals of the T-Cast Network is to get a real grasp on how to create and market fiction based internet video. And then bring that knowledge back to producers and the community at large. We use a number of services like Revver reports, Google Analytics and Feedburner tracking to make observations in our "Producer Tips" stories.

So...

Lesson Learned 1 - Short is King!

In our original series The Retired Porn Producer's Guide to... we have four episodes:

Blogging
- 2 minutes, completes views 11% , converts clicks 3% of the time

Office Meetings
- 2 minutes 20 seconds, completes views 13%, converts clicks 0.7% of the time

Water Cooler Chit-Chat
- 3 minutes, completes views 10% , converts clicks 0.4% of the time

Biking to Work
- 3 minutes, completes views 8% , converts clicks 0.2% of the time

and one promotional episode
A Complicated Man
- 1 minute, completes views 21%, converts clicks 2% of the time

Since posting the videos to Revver, the promo episode, which is the shortest, viewers complete the view 21% of the time, nearly doubling the average. But the Blogging episode, which is 2 minutes long and completes views slightly better than average, converts clicks far better than the promo episode.

But is shorter really better, if so what is the best length? We also have two random un-promoted clips to test the shorter is better theory.

Stop-Animation: Joggling
- 9 seconds, completes views 37%, and converts clicks 2%

My Alien's Not to Bright -
1 minute, completes views 16%, and converts clicks 3.1%

Here again we see that the shorter the video the better it completes views but that a moderately long one minute episode converts more clicks.

If you want to make your video more financially successful you need to keep the clip length under a minute, but make the clips substantial enough to draw users in and entice better advertisers.

Service Update: Revver

The aggregator of clicks which drives the reporting system on Revver.com, seems to still be behind by about 12 hours. Clicks have returned to normal, and view counts seem to reflect marketing efforts and measurable feed/site activities. Hopefully the clicks will catch up in the next few days. One other change, click that once generated $0.30 are now only getting $0.27 .

No comment about any of this has been posted on their blog. With the validity of reports so importent to advertisers, revver is likely trying to handle things quitely. As a poblisher and syndicator, the T-Cast Network is going to give them a few more days to sort it all out.

Content Update: ComedyCaster

We have three new shows for you on ComedyCaster including this one:


That's right, it stars a dog named Jett. Check out the rest of the series.

Service Report: Revver

On April 10th T-Cast Editors contacted Revver support about inconsistencies in the new reporting system was tallying views and clicks. It is now April 14th and the validity of the reports are still in question. Revver's initial response explained the problem as such:

Couple of things here, all related to one bug that was causing duplicate views on videos over the last 24 hours. To fix the problem, we had to reset our view aggregators. Reset doesn't mean "started over," and you're not going to lose credit for any views. It just means recounted, so you're viewcount will be corrected of any duplicate views and should be back to normal by later tonight. If you haven't seen your viewcounts increased by tomorrow let us know.

The next day the reports where still changing and videos that where earning 1-2 clicks a day were still not reporting any earnings. So we continued our inquiry:

My reports still don't make any sense. The Summary says one clip downloaded more times than the total for the day according to the by month report.

Does this effect clicks for those days?

Revver's Response:

Due to the duplicate view bug, the events aggregator had to be re-run - which means that views and earnings (two different kinds of "events") had to be re-aggregated and displayed on the site. So your earnings were also recounted, which means they would have dropped and slowly built back up. The events aggregator is still catching up, but your earnings will be back to their previous levels by tomorrow.

Are video's are in fact earning again, and the reports are as expected except for April 10 where we had a 40% decline in views only. Completed views where as expected. We plan to follow up on Monday, but what we are seeing when we compare our other reporting tools (Feedburner and Google Analytics) is that no embedded video views have been counted for April 10. 100% of the views on that day came from our rss feed.

There are a number of outstanding issue's within Revver's automated reports. There is still no data that would assist in the syndication of videos for either the producer or the syndicator.

Video Sharing Evaluation: Revver - Part 2

Revver.com is a trail-blazer in terms of advertising supported video syndication, in the first part of this evaluation we explored Revver's Website and syndication services which identified a number weaknesses but over all proved it to be a great syndication service. In this posting we will evaluate the service's monetization and promotion tools.

Monetization
With the release of Revver's new reporting took it is now possible to see which videos are downloading, but more valuable than that you can see which videos are holding viewers to its completion and which videos are converting clicks. This has radically changed our understanding of revenue streams on Revver's service.

When you look at revver's download numbers you will find that they are a fraction of that of other video sharing services, but as it turns out this is because until last week Revver only reported completed views. Now that the details are out we can see that only 10-20% of views started were completed, this is a huge factor in the success of a video clip as there is little chance of converting a view to a click if the viewer doesn't actually the clip long enough to see the advertisement. Conversion rates for completed views are actually quite good (10-50%), with some clips vastly out performing others.

Payment per click averages $0.25 - $0.30 which boils down to $0.03 - $0.12 per view for completed views. Shorter clips had many more completed views than the longer clips, while one of our clips entitled "Blogging" converted almost 50% of completed views into clicks. Metadata was the same for clips in the series, suggesting that file title has a large impact on the quality of advertising presented at the end of the video.

Over all average revenue for all views (completed or otherwise) calculates to less than $0.01, making it comparable to MetaCafe's per impression payment of $0.005. There are factors however that impact Revver's revenue potential including, video file length, title, metadata and relative entertainment value. If a clip is short, well put together, holds the attention of its audience to its completion and is positioned properly with suitable advertising, revenue potential on the service could be much higher.

Promotion
Promotion is the biggest problem facing video producer's large and small. What's the point of earning pennies on your videos if those pennies never add up to the thousands of dollars that are required to producer high quality content. So how does Revver promote your videos?

I already mentioned the problems with Revver's website and the strength of its syndication network, but Revver goes beyond that by promoting your clips on their iTunes channel as well as providing permlinks that can be used in RSS feeds for podcasting. Revver has deals with cellphone carriers, most notably Verizon, that can generate higher revenues than advertising.

Revver also supports syndicators like the T-Cast Network by providing 20% share of click through advertising revenue. No doubt all the video sharing services will eventually institute similar programs as a way of ensuring large amount of consistent traffic to videos.

Video Sharing Evaluation: Revver - Part 1

If you've been reading this blog you'll know that, for all its problems, we believe www.revver.com to be one of the best video syndication/monetization sites out there. In this first posting we will detail the pros and cons of Revver's website and syndication tools.

Website
The website has some real problems. Its ajax interface is sloppy, slow and may be the doom of the service since it isn't really all that enjoyable entertainment experience. The quality of the actual video playback and its transcoding is quite good, but unlike iTunes and Stage6, Revver doesn't have its own codec technology so video quality is only as good as the uploaded file. After uploading your video it will be in flash and quicktime, and your thumbnails are generated automatically.

The flash player is solid and loads quickly, and is used for video playback on the site. The search functions are pretty basic, as the metadata indexing seems to be weak in general. There are channels, most notably Lonelygirl15, Ask a Ninja, and V Cast Videos from Verzion. User uploads seem to be made into channels automatically, but you search by user not channel. Most noticeably absent from the site is the ability to create a content producer profile, at the vary least they could have a place to promote a link to the producer's website.

Syndication
Syndication is generally Revver's strong point. Even when website service was down during Revver's recent growing pains, our syndicated videos continued to play. Your syndication choices are:

- Flash using Javascript
- Quicktime for Myspace (<EMBED>)
- Flash Embed
- Quicktime using Javascript
- Thumbnail link

These simple cut and paste codes provide much more variety than YouTube, AtomFilms, and Veoh. They are easily modified and allow for syndication without having to delve into Revver's API.

Advertising is delivered with your syndicated content. Just as it does on the site, the ad plays at the end of the video only once ending on a still frame advertisement. The advertising is clean, varied and seems to be converting between 10-50% of the time. We will post details of the revenue sharing service in a second posting.

Certainly Revver is more of a syndication service than a social network. Your videos are screened to ensure copyright and content eligibility, and its player, streaming capability and advertising are clean and robust. Really a great video hosting/syndication service for independent producers, but is unlikely to bring you strong viewership. You will be responsible for promoting your videos on services like the T-Cast Network Channels ( www.comedycaster.com , www.dramacaster.com , www.scificaster.com).

Service Update: Revver

Revver has finally upgraded its revenue reporting system, and has even more plans in the works according to Sean Boyd (Revver Member Services Coordinator). This upgrade was sorely needed, and will provide producers a more detailed evaluation of their content's advertising potential. If you've been reading our blog you know our estimated earnings off of Revver has thus far been approximately $0.025, but this upgrade changes and elaborates on this calculation.

We will be posting an assessment of Revver's entire service shortly, please check back.

Video Sharing Evaluation: MetaCafe

MetaCafe is another video hosting and syndication service that provides revenue to producers. Like AtomFilm, MetaCafe is a selective content distributor and all submissions must be approved by a selection committee before they are posted. The site doesn't detail exactly the type of content they are looking for, but we've had our animation rejected for its frank sexuality which I guess was to racy for even the adult filter section.

Also like AtomFilms revenues are generated on a per view (instead of a per click) bases. Canadian Press reported on March 29^th that MetaCafe "offers creators $5 for every 1000 views." For those of you who aren't that good at math, I'll break these numbers down for you.

$5/1000 views = $0.005 per view or $0.01 for two views

That's a fair bit behind what the click through service Revver.com that in our experience averages $0.025/view. These royalties are paid on consistent and predictable bases, which makes it very attractive. But does MetaCafe have the traffic to make it worth while?

An examination of the site's most viewed content reveals MetaCafe's revenue potential. The most viewed clip, "Animals vs. Humans" has 11 528 064 views over 17 months, or $57 640; the second most viewed clip, "Freaky Women in an Elevator" has 9 313 248 views over 11 months, or $46 566. Many clips have enjoyed 200 000+ views or $1000.

So MetaCafe could be a great revenue generator for producers and the clips syndicate easily on the T-Cast Network. The video ads are post roll as opposed to AtomFilms pre-roll model, which is nice because viewers aren't really all the patient. Thank you MetaCafe, for creating such an innovative service.