The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Revver has been acquired by LiveUniverse. Revver, one of the video platforms pioneering the revenue sharing among the creator, Revver itself and the sharer, which is on the basis of 40-20-40 has no longer operated the company under the funds of venture capitalists, but would rather operated under the flagship of LiveUniverse. It is reported that Revver sold to LiveUniverse for less than $5 million, but expected to operate independently as part of LiveUniverse, a Los-Angeles startup with about 25 employees and being run by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan.

This move means no other video sites that managed to gain ground on YouTube, claimed to an over 30% market share in online video, though Revver was once appeared as a serious contender to be the next YouTube, as reported by comScore.

via [wsj]

YouTube plans to share its revenue with the users. YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”. The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film, according to this article from BBC.

Since YouTube was bought by Google in November last year for US$1.65 billion, it did not announced any big move that could help its owner, Google to make any money out of its users. However, with this revenue sharing under the supervision of YouTube’s management, it might attract the huge attentions from its existing users, amount to 70 million. This revenue sharing indeed, has been brought up in an article since October last year. This move will further help YouTube to encourage its users to upload, only upload the original contents to the site. I’m not sure how this revenue sharing going to work and this details of plan was also yet to be confirmed by YouTube. As this revenue sharing is not new to much of the video creators, YouTube’s competitor, i.e. Revver has already implemented the revenue sharing on the basis of 40-20-40 with the users.

I wonder money is the greatest motivator to the video creators. Some may say, “Show me the money, I’ll improve my videos”. But I still believed most of the video creators in YouTube are uploading the videos for fun, not for the money.