Revver Has A Parasite?
June 4th, 2007 by Andy |
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I was browsing around this weekend when I discovered SmiqTV, and I was deeply confused by it. Basically, the site pulls most of Revver’s content, including the editor’s picks, most watched, and channels sections, and creates a pseudo-Revver. They aren’t ripping the videos off, they are just embedding them and wrapping the site in ads, making profit off of both. I am not sure what I think of this site. Brilliant, yes. Spammer-y? I think so. This could be a new big wave in online moneymaking- create an automated site that scrapes Youtube or Revver or any other site and wrap your own ads around it and sit back and profit. Its like a super splog! |
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June 5th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Andy,
Alex from Revver here – I just wanted to point out that SmiqTV is using our API to distribute Revver content and earn as an affiliate. People upload their content to Revver with the understanding that all manners of affilaites are going to be using our API to distribute it far and wide, so we definitely encourage this, as it helps creators earn more for their work. For more info on our api, check out our developer center at http://developer.revver.com
June 5th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
oh i am fully aware that they are an affiliate, as are many many other sites. What blew me away about smiqtv is that they are basically a clone of revver, with adsense all over the place- there is very little difference between this site and the actual revver. as far as i can tell there is next to nothing preventing a single company from creating thousands of similar sites quickly and easily to profit off of the ads and a bit off of the affiliate dough from revver. the main brunt of the hosting costs for such a site are borne by revver, making this a simple, easy way to make some cash. it just strikes me as being very similar to the splog tactic, wherein you create thousands of blogs that automatically scrape content from other sites so that you make money off of google visits that see your ads.
i would like to see a more original and less sploggy use of the powerful revver affiliate system, which i think was a great move by you guys. i don’t want thousands of identical sites offering the same videos; that doesn’t help things i don’t think.
June 5th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Agreed that original use of our API is better than rehashings of Revver.com. I misunderstood the question posed by your post – thought I needed to clarify, but i guess not
Anyhow, have a good one, and thanks for the thoughtful post!
June 6th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Hey guys, this is Jason Carlin from Revver. I just wanted to make a few things clear about the nature of our API and it’s uses.
The Revver API is a very, very powerful set of tools. In fact, the website at Revver.com runs entirely off of the very same API we make available FOR FREE to ANYONE. Our unique distributed video and ads network enables us to do this without taking a loss.
That means you get access not only to our library of videos, but to our registration scheme, rating tools, and many other features associated with our application. You can also register and manage your very own users, accept video submissions, search, filter, create collections, and do pretty much anything any other video site can do. For free. With tools we’ve already built.
We’re not here to judge the ways in which these tools are used, we’re here to provide a means for ambitious companies and individuals to build something new without reinventing the wheel.
We believe sites that bring something new to the party will be the most successful. Sites like “Acceptable.tv, GTChannel.com, and ConnectingMoms.com all have a unique use and a special focus, and also happen to be pretty awesome.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
i completely agree that the revver api is a fantastic, powerful tool- i wish it had been around when we were rebuilding our back end because broadcast machine just did not cut it for us at the time and chris built the current cms from scratch. i think the 3 sites you just listed here are perfect examples of what can and should be done with it. i also think that there are tens of millions of legit blogs running on blogger, wordpress, movable type, expression engine, and all the others, it would just be nice for us as a community to be able to limit exploitation like the splogs, which just gum up the works and duplicate content in a truly worthless manner.
i think that smiqtv is a warning shot, the flood of totally identical clone websites is upon us and i hope it is somehow controlled so that the ability for any single website to drive any kind of reasonable traffic to specific videos is not completely lost in a sea of parasitic clone sites. variety is good, and necessary; identical clone sites that pretty much exist to automatically generate ad revenue or increase google pagerank are not.
June 6th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
It’s sad that not too much can be done to “fight” those spam/splog sites. Logically you figure people would just not use them, but they don’t really depend on regular or intentional users. They are mainly designed to get their traffic through organic searches. The real negative effect they have is on the validity of searches.