Enhance Your Digital Images Online While Monetizing Their Advertising Potential: BritePic

When it comes to sharing or monetizing Internet video, there are plenty of options, but until now enhancing and monetizing the photos on your website hasn't really been possible. However, a new free service allows you to do just that - adding monetization and a list of other features that make it easy for you to brand, share and improve the use-value of your online images.

A short while back I reviewed AdBrite Invideo (now known as BriteFlic), a simple but effective service that allows you to add branding and unobtrusive contextual advertising to your online video clips. Well now AdBrite has applied the same idea to the web publishing of photos, with impressive results.

The idea is simple, offering you the chance to enhance photos and images you embed into your website in a number of ways. This new service makes it easy to:

• Serve up contextual advertising and make money from your photos (if you want to)
• Enlarge and zoom your images once published. If you have a large, high-resolution image, but only so much space to fit it into, don't fret - with this feature your site visitors can zoom right into any part of the image with maximum ease
• Embed and share your images with others just like you do with any YouTube videos - you can also easily send any image via email
• Add your custom watermark to brand your photos, wherever they go
• Add pop-up captions to your photos, which appear when hovering your mouse on your selected image and which can also be linked to other websites, should you want to provide extra information, marketing or promotion

With even more features on the way - including the ability for your site visitors to rate and discuss any published image, BritePic appears to be a great way for you to bring your photos into the Web 2.0 age of portable data and easy content distribution.

 

 

BritePic - Overview

BrightPic is a simple, free way to add interactivity, portability and, as an optional extra, monetization to your images.

The following short video from the BritePic website talks you through the basics:

AdBrite has really struck a fantastic blow to both image-sharing and publishing services as well as to contextual ad and monetization outlets - by being the first to do what should have been now obvious to many: leveraging the widespread use of digital images online to both enhance user-experience as well as to monetize its intrinsic value whenever possible.

By providing image-enhancing features and a simple but thoroughly effective contextual monetization approach, BritePic showcases a marketing and communication solution that seems so obvious it is surprising that nobody has thought of it before.

Even if you aren't interested in monetizing the digital images on your web pages, the additional digital image enhancements such as image-zooming, captioning, branding-watermarking and easy photo-sharing-and-embedding, do really add an extra layer of tangible value to your visuals.

Your BritePic Account

Signing up for a BritePic account is very straightforward, and when you do so you are given the chance to opt-in (or out) of AdBrite advertising for your images.

As a first thing you are asked to provide a URL for the website on which you intend to display your images on, along with keywords that will help AdBrite to serve-up suitable ads inside your images. After that, you can choose how often to receive payment by selecting a minimum amount for checks to be sent out to you. The default setting is for $100.

Once signed up you are given a BritePic code, which you will use when embedding your images. This provides some extra security that any money made from advertising comes back to your account.

Embedding Images

BritePic does not host your images itself. You need to upload them to a image-hosting or image-sharing of your choice and then let BritePic know their location. This is a pretty straightforward task, as BritePic has an Instant-HTML-generator that automatically creates the code that you need to copy and paste into your website.

All you have to do is tap in the URL of your image, give BritePic some keywords to associate to it (to help in the selection of relevant contextual advertising), and then copy and paste the JavaScript (or optional non-JavaScript) code into your blog post or web site page.

Images must be in JPEG format, and if you want to make use of advertising, these must be of at least 355 x 110 pixels in size.

Additional BritePic image-editing options include being able to:

• Activate or deactivate the display of contextual ads for the image you are embedding
• Add a custom watermark, allowing you to brand your photos with a JPEG logo that will appear at the lower right hand side of your images
• Integrate a link to any URL within any of your images
• Customize a text-caption that discretely pop-ups when hovering the image and will otherwise defaults to the original filename of your image
• Resize your image, should you wish to

Once you have made all your changes and adjustments, you can preview how your image will look like and how it will interact with your readers before finally publishing it.

See For Yourself

The following image is an example BritePic photo. It illustrates exactly how BritePic works when embedded directly into a blog post or web-page.

Roll over the image, and you should be able to see the caption, click through to a new web page, or select from the various options available to you through the menu on the bottom-left corner of the image.

The contextual integrated ad appears, when you hover with your mouse, on the top-left side of the image.

On the above example, I suggest you give a good look also at the integrated zooming capabilities which allow you to magnify and move around the image very easily.

Advantages of using BritePic

For every dollar spent by advertisers to promote their products through your BritePic images, you keep 70¢ while AdBrite is happy to bank on the remaining 30¢. Positively a great offering for all independent publishers alike considering the costs AdBrite has to incur to arrange, track and collect advertising money for you.

Another advantage offered by the BritePic new image-delivery service is that it allows you to monitor and track with precision where your images are used, and who profits from them. As many among you (those already publishing a web site with a significant audience) already know, your web-published images can be easily "grabbed", "linked" and "re-used" by other not very educated and respectful publishers in a matter of clicks. This happens quite frequently, at least for what I see on this site, and it is annoying to you, as the original publisher because your web site becomes the free "provider" of those selected images to other web sites, which publish them as if theirs, while only you pay the hosting bills for them. This is why for those hoping to make money from their digital photos - photographers for instance - having a little more control over their images is a highly welcome proposition.

This is why I personally recommend this solution to all commercial online publishers desiring to offer a greater user experience and a way to bring to an end to free subsidizing of those often uneducated webmasters stealing your pics. With BritePic all your web published images will retain your watermark, a reference link URL, personalized caption text and integrated account information that will guarantee that all ad-revenues do come back to you. And not only I do recommend it... I am going to require all our editors to start using BritePic across all of our sites too, starting today.

Possible Drawbacks

BritePic leverages the ubiquitous Flash format to serve and display your images. While this means that the vast majority of browsers will be able to display your images, there is one potential drawback that you might want to consider.

With BritePic, while adding the ability to monetize your pictures with discrete contextual ads, you lose the display and use of the "img alt" tag. This means that the text associated to your published images in that tag will be no longer accessible to search engines crawlers. The "img alt" tag allows you in fact to assign keywords and text description to an image, so that when a search engine crawler comes by your site, it will index the content of those tags as well. This can be an effective way of driving traffic to your website, as people find you not only through the main content of your article but also through the text you use to describe and title your images.

All considered though, the compromise seems like a fair one, and it is at least worth some serious consideration. On the "con" side it may be worth thinking well about the fact that BritePic makes use of JavaScript code to embed your images, which some users have turned off in their web browsers (I know several ones). Keep in mind that for those users there will be no image to see where you will have used BritePic-enhanced images.

My other issue with the monetization aspect of BritePic is that at the moment, targeting of ads doesn't seem to be hugely effective, however precise you are in your keyword decisions. If your ads are poorly targeted, the chances of you getting a decent click-through-rate are going to be limited, so this is something that will hopefully improve over time. People visiting a website about pets, for instance, are unlikely to be interested in clicking on ads for home owner loans or car parts.

Conclusions

BritePic is a fresh and long overdue idea that brings digital photos into the age of the web widget.

BritePic is a great way to add interactivity, sharing features and monetization options to the images you publish on your website or blog.

BritePic really does make it easy for you to share your images, brand them with your custom logo, add discrete contextual advertising and allow users to zoom in and out of them. All n' all, customizing an image with BritePic may not take more than a minute.

The image-sharing features are useful, such as the ability to let your site visitors embed your image into their websites or email it to their friends.

Of great interest for most online independent publishers is the opportunity of enhancing the readers user-experience while being able to monetize published digital images.

As BritePic just launched, it lacks yet a great inventory of advertisers to work with. As such, BritePic is unlikely to make you a mountain of advertising revenue right away. But by allowing others to embed your images elsewhere it tangibly boosts your viral marketing options while seeding an extra opportunity for additional income in the near future. Obviously, the more places your images appear, the greater your potential audience. With a 70 / 30 cut of ad revenues in your favor, this could prove very profitable over time for larger online publishers.

As a brand new service there are also a few things that might need to be ironed out to really make the most of its potential in the near future. For one, ad-targeting seems to be not very accurate, and this is likely to significantly affect how much you will earn from ad revenues. Furthermore, the choice to make use of JavaScript code for displaying BritePic-enhanced images will make it impossible for some of your web readers to even see your photos, in addition to making them inaccessible to search engines as well.

In short: BritePic is well worth checking out if you make large use of digital images on your web site and want to augment the user-experience of your readers. BritePic is also worth a try if you want to add specific extra functionality to your images (zooming in particular is worth the whole BritePic ticket), or if you want to create an extra revenue stream for your site while making it easier for other to republish your images without stealing your bandwidth.

Additional resources

If you want to learn more about BritePic, you might want to check out the following links:

• The BritePic website
• Further examples at BrightPic.com
• Sign up for BritePic
• Tech Crunch coverage of BritePic

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: "Enhance Your Digital Images Online While Monetizing Their Advertising Potential: BritePic"