Rik Abel

Last week I was geeking out about YouTube.com, which allows you to upload, share and tag your videos and hosts them for free. There are quite a few of these video hosting and tagging services now, but this morning I learned - via the print version of the Guardian (!) - of Revver.com, which does pretty much the same as YouTube BUT (and it’s a HUGE but), you get paid when people watch your movies! How awesome is that? Based on the tags you apply to the movie, a ‘relevant’ ad is appended to your movie file - whenever someone clicks on the ad, you get paid! Here’s the really clever bit:

"Since the ad (called a RevTag) is permanently embedded in your
video, you get paid no matter where your video may go regardless if it
is:

• E-mailed to friends
• Burned to a CD
• Uploaded to another popular website
• Shared via P2P or IM
• Linked on del.icio.us, digg.com, your own blog, or anywhere else"

Pretty clever, huh? Now I just need to find a decent .3gp to .avi  or .mov converter so I can upload my marvellous cameraphone movies. I hope it doesn’t totally crappify the framerate like YouTube does (see my skating through Shad Thames video, for example). I hope my movies will look better (as in actually be watchable) if I convert them prior to uploading.

Anyway, Revver looks very promising - this looks like a great way to get some revenue for your ‘user-generated’ content. If only I were a hot coed girl…:D I expect the problem of ‘tag spam’ (’sex’, ’sexy’ ‘hot’ ‘girls’ etc for content which contains none of the aforementioned) will rapidly become apparent. If it isn’t already.

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