Revver Videos on Zango Explained

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Last week, Chris Pirillo was exasperated to find out that his videos were being distributed via Zango and required installation of the Zango software to view these videos, which are otherwise widely available for free.

For any affiliates not familiar with Zango and their negative history with affiliate marketers, Ben Edelman and Kellie Stevens have covered Zango, and there is a good explanation of Zango’s impact on affiliate marketing at the ABestWeb forum.

Anyhow, as it turned out, Zango was getting Pirillo’s videos from the API at Revver.

“If Revver doesn’t address this issue, or allow me to opt-out of being embedded specifically by Zango, I’ll simply close and delete my Revver account and videos - and encourage others to do the same.”

Chris heard from Asi Behar, VP, Software Engineering at Revver soon after his post:

Revver is, and always has been, an open syndication network. Our platform - whether it be the API, widgets, RSS feeds, or direct embeds - was designed to offer creators and sharers of content a way to fully white label and monetize their video experience - a service offered to each and every Revver member.

In this respect, Zango is no different from any other sharer/syndicator on our network: they’re using our API, which every Revver user has full access to, to pull and share content. They earn the 20% syndication fee just as any other Revver user would for sharing and driving traffic to Revver content, and must agree to our terms of service in order to do so. As a result, they are helping creators earn money by exposing their content to their audience.

The openness of our network is both a philosophical and technical feature of our network. We’ve resisted numerous partners that insisted on partitioning off content; we feel strongly that the future of media, especially on the internet, lies in its ability to be freely shared and distributed and we’d really like to see this ideal succeed.

Despite our stance, however, we do recognize that some creators may not want their content distributed by Zango, so we’ll contact them to help remedy the situation. If you or any Revver member requests, we will contact Zango on your behalf and request they stop using your content on their site. Revver members can contact us via our contact form to request assistance.

We’d like to see an internet where content is allowed to roam freely while still earning money for our creators and sharers - so to that end we’ll be re-evaluating Zango’s use of the Revver API. I’ll keep you posted with any news on the matter.”

Nice to see the quick action from Revver, and anybody who is uploading videos to Revver can now opt-out of Zango having access to their videos via the API.

Lastly, Revver provides an opportunity for affiliates to earn commission from videos they run on their sites. More details at http://one.revver.com/go/share_help.