we're funded!

We are proud and excited to announce our first-round of funding. Image Space Media received $2.9 million in first-round financing from leading industry investors, led by New Atlantic Ventures. We are also excited to welcome Michael Gordon, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Limelight Networks, Inc. to the Image Space Media Board of Directors.

This is amazing news for everyone here at Image Space Media headquarters — and for you — our publishers. With this round of funding we will be able to continue improvements on our technology and build out our service, ensuring publishers can get the most out of network participation.

This great news has generated a lot of industry buzz. Read the full press release here.

publishers of the month

At the risk of sounding sappy, one of the best parts of working for Image Space Media is that we get paid to check out all of your great sites. We love the content you post - from beautiful fashion photography to the latest sports news. The roster of Image Space Media publishers spans the gamut of interests.

Here are our picks for Image Space Media’s January Publishers of the Month:

OBVIOUS Magazine: A web-zine that caters to all sexes with diverse and interesting content. "Obvious Magazine - Because Life Isn't."

The Design Mag: A site for anyone and everyone in the graphic design community. Check out The Design Mag for the latest design trends and tutorials.

image tagging survey results

Last month we shared tips for image-tagging, which makes ads more relevant to your images and help drive CPC and CTR rates. Since many of our publishers are already experts in the field, we wanted to get your input on what you all think are the best image-tagging strategies so we developed a survey.

We had an incredible turnout, receiving hundreds of terrific responses. Here's some of the fantastic advice that was submitted:

From Team Pilipinas

1. Use the "Alt Attribute of the IMG tag
Make sure to use the "alt" attribute of the image tag, ensuring it describes the image you are trying to present. The attribute should describe the image in a short "to the point" way that reads naturally to the viewers.

2. Put Captions In Your Images
Placing a caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help cue the search engines to what the image is about. With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute, but be sure the flow is natural.

3. Image File Names (filename of image)
Name your images in a way that describes what they are. Don't get carried away though. If it's a picture of a basketball team, name it basketball-team.jpg, rather than leaving it whatever your camera or photo editing software wants to name it. Use dashes between the words, rather than underscores.

From Funky Downtown

My blog's content is about funny, freaky, weird, strange, humor and interesting photos, so I use these words as my tags to get the most relevant ads to appear in the images so my visitors don't feel it’s an ad, treating it instead as part of the resource content of my blog.

From Scene 360

If you don't overdo it with ads, you usually get the best results. I'm careful with added alt tags to each image, so that it shows up in search engines and also is relevant for the Image Space Media ads. I think diversity of imagery really helps mix up the tagging and getting a lot of different yet relevant ads showing up for each image.

And ... drumroll, please … the winner of the Image Tagging Survey and proud owner of a brand new Canon Power Shot is cliQs.com, who submitted these terrific tips:

From cliQs.com

Our images had only one simple word in the ALT tags, and we were still not happy with the relevant ads that would show on the images. What we did was, we implemented a SQL function to automatically create a matching ALT image tag from the relevant article that the images belonged to. By having more than one keyword on each image, the matching relevant ads were more accurate and therefore a better match to the articles as well.

Here is a code snippet of what we implemented for our system.

// BEGIN AUTOMATIC IMG ALT TAGS
$key_strip = array(",", ";", " a ", " in ", " at ", "and", "the", "for", "with");

if ($xview == "showad" && (int)$_GET["adid"] > 0)
{
$sql = "SELECT adtitle, addesc FROM $t_ads a WHERE a.adid = $xadid";
$ad = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query($sql));
$no_tag_desc = strip_tags($ad["addesc"]);

$desc_output = preg_replace("/\r?\n/m", " ", $no_tag_desc);
$meta_description = substr($desc_output, 0, 255) . '...';
$mk = str_replace($key_strip, "", $ad["adtitle"]);
$mk = eregi_replace(" +", " ", $mk);
$mk = explode(" ", $mk);
$meta_keywords = implode(", ", $mk);
}
// END AUTOMATIC IMG ALT TAGS"

Thanks to everyone who responded. We’ll be running future contests so stay tuned and don’t miss your chance to win great prizes and propel the image space forward.

What a great start to 2010. Image Space Media again sends thanks to all of our publishers in beta and we are excited to be a part of the upcoming South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) where we will debut our technology officially. We hope you’ll join us there!