Advancements in Image Space's Technology:

1) We have enhanced the speed at which the ads load on our publisher's pages.

2) We recently modified our blog categorization system, adding more keyword possibilities. This means that our ads have gotten more specific and relevant to your site. For example, whereas before a dessert blog using Image Space might have featured general ads for foods or dieting, the ads now might be for chocolate chip cookies. Because of this, our click-through rates have increased. However, this also means that our CPC rates have temporarily gone down as we begin the process of building up our collection of advertisers who provide these specific ads. This temporary decrease is a part of the process of making our ads more specific and giving you a higher click-through rate -- the CPC rates will catch up as we begin selling against the new detailed category list. We ask for your patience as we continue this process.

Organizational News:

1) We have recently teamed up with veteran team from the digital media industry who can help us enhance our ad partnerships and pipe in ads from reputable networks such as Google, Microsoft, etc. For our publishers, this is exciting news as these enhanced ad partnerships will speed up the process of increasing CPC rates.

2) We are still projected to exit Beta by the end of this year with an innovative and robust new product and better reporting tools and analytics behind each publishers' images. Since we are still in Beta, your feedback is very important to us, both so that we can improve Image Media Space's existing services and so that we can better identify needed areas for innovation.

Thank you again for using Image Space's technology!

Best,
The Image Space Media Team

So we haven’t posted in a week or so, and it’s not because we’ve been away.  Quite the contrary! The team has been doing extensive work on updating some “under the hood” type stuff regarding our overlay technology. In the last couple of months, we’ve been taking in feedback from our publisher clients and we’ve been going down that punch list the entire month of August. The result is a revamped javascript library that fixes or increases functionality or usability.

We are happy that we have such an active publisher base and appreciate the patience and participation of each and every one of you!

Here are a few significant updates that are worth mentioning.

“X” marks the spot – There were a few requests asking for the ability to  close an ad in case the user did not want to see it every time on rollover.  We understand that ads are not for everyone, so we built in the ability to close an ad. If a user initiates this close, he will not see an ad on that image again on that pageview.

Top Down Overlay – Some publishers noted that large images with the bottom of the image “below the fold” were not maximized. If the bottom of the image was off the screen, users would not notice it. So we also updated our positioning algorithm to take this into account. That is why you may have  noticed the overlay rolling from the top down in certain instances. This is by design.

Dynamic Alignment – A small subset of publishers were affected by alignment issues with our ad overlay. That was mainly because other non-image space javascript augmented certain properties on the page after our overlay was initially created. To resolve this, we dynamically calculate positioning on every mouseover so our algorithm is always using the most current page and image properties.

Under the hood – There were other technical changes. Namely, we rewrote the  entire javascript library to be more flexible and more secure. We won’t bore you with the details, but rest assured we continue to take in feedback and love to hear from you guys!

In the coming weeks, we’ll be working on and releasing additional updates with the javascript, as well as some tweaks for our publisher panel and how we match categories. All the updates are focused on helping the publisher get better and more valuable ads, and help advertisers purchase more logically.

Stay tuned!

The Image Space Media team