March 29, 2007
AdBrite looks to build ad layer into images
TechCrunch is reporting AdBrite’s ambitious plans to reinvent the tag to incorporate advertising. The pitch: rather than embed your images using the standard
tag, embed it using BritePic’s remote javascript so that they can layer it with advertising. Of course, BritePic includes features to the layering like a digital Zoom, watermark, and caption that I would say are only nominally interesting to web surfers. I don’t imagine these were anything but afterthoughts to the advertising functionality.
Will it succeed? Not in becoming any type of new image standard, that’s for sure. But they have a good shot at attracting webmasters with an insatiable appetite for advertising inventory and revenue opportunities. The catalyst for growth, like any of the distributed ad systems that embed contextual ads on 3rd party websites, is that each ad slot also becomes an ad for the advertising network. This is also the fuel behind the growth of sites like YouTube that allow their video’s to be “embedded” on 3rd party sites. Each remotely displayed embed essentially further promotes the content distributor through a self-sustaining network effect. Overall, I think it’s an example of a really simple idea that creates value out of nothing.
However, there is also a risk in putting the contextual determination in the hand of the embedder and not the trusted network: Do I want to chance that my company’s advertising will show up on some adult site photos because they were tagged incorrectly?
