Revver: what happened, and why it shut down

Revver was a Los Angeles video sharing site, launched on 29 October 2005, that was the first to attach advertising to user videos and split the money with the people who made them. Its RevTag travelled inside the video file, so a creator was paid wherever the clip was watched. LiveUniverse bought it in February 2008, stopped paying, and the site closed on 20 August 2011.

Timeline [edit]

2005

29 October 2005 Launch

Revver launches

Advertising attached to user videos, revenue split with creators.

2006

September 2006 Version

Redesign, Flash delivery and a creator dashboard

2007

2007 Peak

First million dollars paid to creators

2008

February 2008 Acquisition

LiveUniverse buys Revver

About $5 million.

9 December 2008 Incident

Payments stop arriving

Creators move to blip.tv.

2011

20 August 2011 Shutdown

Revver goes offline

No announcement.

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: LiveUniverse, Brad Greenspan's company, bought Revver for about $5 million in February 2008 and stopped making the revenue share payments within months. Creators left for blip.tv and YouTube, and the site went off on 20 August 2011 without an explanation.

Our analysis: Revver had the right idea four years early and then handed it to the wrong owner. Attaching a tracking tag to the video file itself, so the creator got paid wherever the file travelled, was a genuinely clever answer to the piracy of the early sharing era, and Revver paid out its first million dollars in 2007. But YouTube had the audience, and once Google bought it and launched its own partner programme in 2007 the difference in reach was fatal. The 2008 sale to LiveUniverse turned a struggling pioneer into an unpaid debt: creators who had trusted the model were owed money that never arrived, and the reputation that was Revver's only remaining asset was gone.

History [edit]

Pay the people who make the videos

Revver was founded in 2004 as ChangeTv by Steven Starr, Ian Clarke, the Freenet author, and Oliver Luckett, and launched on 29 October 2005 out of Los Angeles with money from Bessemer, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner. It was a video site in the year that video sites were being invented, and it was the only one that started from a question the others avoided: who gets paid.

The answer was the RevTag. Every uploaded video got an advertisement at the end and a tracking tag welded into the file, so the clip could be downloaded, emailed, posted on someone else\'s blog or shared over peer-to-peer, and the click on the advert still reported home. Revenue was split half to the creator and half to Revver, with affiliates who spread the video taking twenty percent. Uploads were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, which was unusual and deliberate.

It worked well enough to matter. The lonelygirl15 team signed a promotional deal in 2006, Television Week named it the most influential independent website, and in 2007 Revver said it had paid its first million dollars to creators.

Sold, and then not paid

In February 2008 Revver was sold for about $5 million to LiveUniverse, the company of MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan. Within months the revenue share payments became irregular and then stopped. In December 2008 Revver told users that June earnings had been sent and the rest would follow as soon as possible. They did not. Popular producers including ScrewAttack and That Guy with the Glasses posted public complaints about money owed and moved their shows to blip.tv. California listed LiveUniverse as suspended in 2010, and on 20 August 2011 revver.com went off without a statement.

The domain today

revver.com is parked. The videos, and the payment records, are gone.

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Revver

Timeline [edit]

The site through time

Ownership [edit]