Adbrite's new image standard

Now this is very clever. While every superannuated TV exec and trend-following marketing guru witters on about web video, a Sequoia-backed startup has zagged in the other direction. Adbrite, a venture founded by Philip Kaplan of Fucked Company fame, has come up with a simple way to embed advertising in images. It's part of the web's unfinished business. A publisher doesn't have to do anything to the images themselves: the wizardry is in some javascript code which lays interactive functions over the image, such as a watermark and an ad strip at the top of the picture which expands when a user's cursor passes over. It's extremely simple — a web producer can tune the image "player" simply by editing the javascript code — which means that publishers might actually use it. But why is Valleywag, usually so cynical, excited about Adbrite's new offering?

Embedded ads may allow photographers to make money out of their work. At the moment, the economic value of most photographs on the web is too low for commissioning to be viable. The result: most images are reproduced, if the creator is lucky, with credit and a link back to the original source. The gratification is psychological rather than financial. It's a karma economy, which is unsustainable. Amateur and freelance photographers need the possibility of financial reward, if they're not to feel exploited, and undermine, by legal action, web publishing. These blogs would look very gray if they relied only on licensed photos from the traditional libraries.

Imagine that photo sites such as Flickr supported Adbrite's new standard, and photographers began to include in their standard license, the requirement that anyone using their images copy, not just the image, or the web address of the source, but the whole javascript code, calling up their watermark and advertising from which they would benefit. Adbrite makes it easy for bloggers and publishers to copy and paste this image code into their own pages. Right now, it's laborious to include information about the provenance of a photo; and there is no frictionless way to ensure that the photographer's compensated. If image makers, en masse, adopted Adbrite's new image standard, there would be no excuse.

Disclosure: Gawker Media uses Adbrite to sell text ads on several sites. I know and like Phil Kaplan, in part, because there are still photos of him cavorting with semi-naked women, back from his hard-partying Manhattan years.

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