ImageSpaceMedia.com Make Money From The Images On Your Site

Update: PicAdMedia.com is now ImageSpaceMedia.com, so when you click on the links it will redirect you to that site.

Even though sites like Youtube stream 1.2 billion videos per day it still pales in comparison to how many images are viewed on the web daily, yet there is still no company to successfully monetize images. Of course sites like IstockPhoto and ShutterStock make millions from selling images but that business model only works for a few. Websites, blogs and social sites with millions of images can't benefit from that business model. This is where in-image/in-picture advertising comes in, which is an idea that works similar in-video advertising where an overlay ad is placed on top of the image. Now the concept of making money from images by means of In-Picture Advertising is not a new thing, BritePic (A product of Adbrite) was one of the first services to offer a monetization model for images but the model's possible success was hindered by the inconvenient method of implementing the ads into your images.The idea is that you would have to log into BritePic or Adbrite and manually ad your images which would return a embed code for you to place on your website. The problem here is that the code is javascript and it generates a flash version of your image, this means Google or any other search engine would not be able to pick up those images which means less traffic and if you have a website with allot of images your already aware that a significant percentage of your traffic is accredited to the images on your site. Secondly this is a time consuming method not to mention that all the images already on your site will not benefit from the method.
Introducing PicAdMedia
About a month ago I received a email from someone over at PicAdMedia inviting me to a private Beta testing of there new In-Picture Advertising service, as soon as I saw “In Picture Advertising” I remembered BritePic and I deleted the email. For about 3 weeks from time to time I continued to receive emails from them, they eventually wore me down so before I decided on adding them to the spam list I went to check there service out. After signing up and checking out the dashboard I quickly realized that the method by which they place the ads on websites was completely different from BritePic's and adheres to standards of web usability. I decided to test out the service on my hip hop music blog HipHopMusicDotCom since it had the most images on it.
PicAdMedia wins at everything that BritePic fails at, implementation is very simple just add the website(s) you would like to serve ads on then get the embed code, place it on your website or blog and boom shortly after that ads will start appearing on all the images on your site. The ads are shown whenever a visitor hovers over a image on your website via a slide in effect and slide's out whenever the visitor hovers away from the image. The best thing about the ads is that they open in a new window so you don't loose your visitor when they decide to view an ad. It 100% compliant with Google Adsense and you can also set it to only display ads on certain images for example if you have a logo in your website header, in the Image Manager dashboard (image below) section of PicAdMedia you can set it so that image does not display any ads on that logo. The ad engine is very fast as soon as your page loads the ads are available for display though I'm not sure how they will perform with billion impressions happening daily across the web.

PicAdMedia Image Manager

As you can see in the image above PicAdMedia scans your website for all the images available on your website and archives them inside your admin area called the “Image Manager”, it automatically creates tags for the images which is pulled from the meta data available in the images. In the future this will be very beneficial for advertisers who want to target keyword specific images which will drive more targeted visitors to the advertiser's website and generate higher earnings for publishers.
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Above are some ads from HipHopMusicDotCom, as you can see the ads are not very targeted but that is to be expected since it's still only in the BETA stages and currently advertising isn't even open for testing yet.

PicAd Domain Manager Dashboard

Above is a screen shot of the Domain Manager where you can add the domains you would like to display ads on.

PicAd reports dashboard

Above is a 7 day earning report from PicAdMedia, of course I can't show you certain stats due to PicAdMedia's policy but lets just say that click through rate isn't that great which is to be expected from untargeted ads, however this doesn't mean your site wouldn't perform better, keep in mind that I tested it on my hip hop music blog. With these early stats I can say this could become a additional income stream with more targeted ads and also would be a new frontier for advertisers. I can see how I could drive some major targeted traffic to some of my other sites with this platform at a much lower price than Google Adwords.
Something like this would be great for sites with a thousand images or more, photo sharing sites like photobucket, imageshack and tinypic would make a killing from this. Just think about displaying targeted ads over a hundred thousand images being viewed by millions of visitors. Blogs that post images almost everyday would do great with a service like this as well.
In closing I have to say that I'm going to continue to display PicAdMedia ads on HipHopMusicDotCom since it generates additional untapped revenue and doesn't affect my other income streams plus I haven't lost any traffic because of it which is the most important thing. Registration for there beta test is currently open to the public for publishers but not advertisers which is what I'm now waiting for, if you have a blog or website with quite a few images you should definitely check them out.
Visit PicAdMedia