But now it's even better. This revamp is the biggest in Google Image history, since its launch in 2001.

Google Director of Search Products Ben Ling at Google's search press event

Here are some of the big changes to the way images are displayed:

• The search results page is all images now, without the clutter of text and links.
• The thumbnails are bigger.
• There is continuous scrolling so you can see more images faster.
• Scrolling over a thumbnail now shows you the a link, the URL, and the image size.
• Clicking on a thumbnail brings you to a full-size version of the image with the image's original website in the background.

Another addition to Google Images is the new Image Search Ads. The image search results page has always had ads at the top, but now these ads will contain thumbnail images along with text. The ads will still be differentiated from organic search results with a different color background and a label of "Sponsored Link."

The screenshot below shows an example of these new, highly relevant ads on an image search for cars.

New Google Image Search ads with images

Right now these thumbnail ads are only available for the Google Image search page, but they will probably come to other Google search pages in the future.

We think Google's Image Search Ads are a great way for advertisers to connect people to their brand through the power of images, just like our own In-Image ads. What do you think of the new Google Images?

Some companies have already mastered creative Internet advertising. The Internet Advertising Competition, produced by the Web Marketing Association, recognizes the best in online advertising in dozens of categories in every industry, from Best Insurance Online Video to Best Leisure Online Campaign to Best B2B Rich Media Online Ad.

Here are some of our favorite 2010 winners:

Best of Show Rich Media Online Ad:

"Living Breathless"

Agency: Cossette

Look at the ad in action for the full effect. The desperation in the video would definitely get a reader's attention.

"Living Breathless" Rich Media Online Ad

Best Consumer Goods Website:

"The Next Big Thing"

Agency: VML

This website features a surreal interactive landscape that highlights the product benefits of LG's largest-capacity washing machine in a fun, creative way.

"The Next Big Thing" Website

Best Newspaper Website:

"Unplug. It's Sunday."

Agency: IQ Interactive

This website introducing the new and improved Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday paper captures the essence of a relaxing Sunday. You can explore the features of the newspaper by clicking on objects in different rooms of the lazy Sunday home.

"Unplug. It's Sunday." Website

The most successful online ad campaigns are the ones that go viral, like the recent Old Spice campaign. It's hard to predict what goes viral, as we wrote about before, but Wiedan + Kennedy had a flawless strategy to bring the "Old Spice guy" into the limelight. The Old Spice campaign will undoubtedly win big in next year's Internet Advertising Competition.

What's the best Internet advertising you've seen recently?

The AdStart Homepage

AdStart is so easy to use that your campaigns basically create themselves. But there are a few steps you can take to increase the effectiveness of your ads. Here are some tips:

• Create multiple versions of each ad, and monitor your results to see which ones perform the best. Small changes in the wording of your ads can make a huge difference in their success.
• Add conversion tracking to find out how your clicks are translating to leads, sales, signups, etc. You can easily add tracking pixels to any page of your website, from the homepage to the checkout page.
• Target specific locations and categories. If your ad is relevant in every country except Australia, then you can exclude all Australian sites. If your ad is only relevant for automotive and men's interest, then you include only automotive and men's interest sites. Taking just a couple minutes to choose locations and categories will dramatically improve your results by always showing your ads to the right people.

Target specific locations and categories on the Create Campaign page.

• Use frequency capping to restrict the number of times a specific user views your ad in a specific period of time. This decreases ad fatigue and overexposure to avoid a drop in response rate.
• Increase the CPC rate. Raising your CPC rate above the minimum will increase the priority of you ads, putting you ahead of the lower-bidding advertisers.
• Modify your ad scheduling based on your audience. For example, Christmas tree ads won't be as effective in the middle of the summer, and office supply ads won't be as effective on weekends.

Follow those simple steps and you'll start seeing results in no time! Have you tried AdStart yet? Do you have any tips that we didn't mention?

In-Image advertising, for example, is so effective because with the most relevant ads placed on images, users are more likely to click on the ads. And the more users that click on the ads, the more money the publisher of the website makes, and the more conversions the advertiser gets. So everyone is satisfied...

...unless the ads disappear. Last week, Apple released Safari 5, which includes a new feature called Safari Reader. This tool eliminates all distractions on a webpage, allowing the user to see only the article he or she is trying to read. The "distractions" are ads. The example below shows a website before and after Reader is applied.

Safari Reader hides ads on web pages to make articles more readable.

Safari detects when you're on a page with an article, and a Reader icon appears in the address bar, which you can click on to activate Reader. All the ads on the page disappear, and you can scroll through the whole article, even if it's on multiple pages. You also have the option of emailing or printing the article and zooming in or out.

So what does Safari Reader mean for online advertising? Bad news first:

When Internet users stop seeing ads on websites, advertisers stop paying to place ads on websites. And publishers can't provide quality content if they don't make enough money.

For example, newspapers are already struggling to stay in business, and they depend increasingly on online advertising revenue as subscription sales continue to decline. With no advertising on their websites, they can't pay their reporters.

"Newspaper" from stock.xchng user digitill

So is this the end of the advertiser-publisher relationship that has been helping to sustain online media? Maybe. But most likely, not at all. Here's the good news:

Only about 3.5% of people use Safari as their primary Internet browser. Safari Reader is likely just another new tool that a few people will use, while the majority of Internet users keep seeing and clicking on ads like usual.

Every other day someone else is proclaiming the end of the Internet as we know it. So far, the web is still here. And I predict it will be around for awhile.

The AdStart Homepage

We don't usually like bragging, but we can't resist. Results from beta testing of AdStart have been higher than we ever imagined. Compared to Google AdWords, AdStart yielded a CTR seven times higher for a fraction of the cost. Basically, that means AdStart rocks.

The AdStart Campaigns Overview Page

Here are a few examples of what AdStart can offer advertisers:

• Access to over 4,500 sites and over 55 million unique visitors per month
• In-depth reporting and conversion tools to optimize your ROI
• Increase in sales, leads, downloads, subscriptions and brand awareness
• Better targeting, better relevance and better engagement

We'd love to hear what you think of AdStart. To try it out, click here. Leave us a comment with your feedback!

Along with images, Image Space Media also loves ads! Therefore, we would like to recognize Adpunch as Publisher of the Week.

"Adpunch Blog provides your daily dose of advertising and marketing news." Interested in internet-based advertising & marketing, marketing and advertising trends, cultural and demographic changes affecting advertising strategies, new campaign launches, viral and buzz marketing, useful industry research and the analysis of the industry's shift from old ideas to new?! Well then this blog is for you. Awesome print advertisements and useful marketing news makes this blog a daily MUST read!

Bookmark Adpunch now!

Courtesy of Flickr user fidgetrainbowtree

Since we consider ourselves to be a part of the new wave of internet advertising and web monetization strategies, we try to stay abreast of internet advertising news at Image Space Media headquarters. That means spending a bit of time every day on our Google Readers, on Yammer, and on Twitter, reading the latest about tech startups, advertising, marketing... Anything that seems relevant to our work. And about once a week, we've been sharing what we've been reading with you all, at our What's Happening Around the Web tag.

So what's new this week?

In startup news...

Quora recently closed its first round of funding with a valuation estimated at $86 million. Quora is a new site (invite only!) that provides a question and answer service. It's success, however, is based on the fact that it goes beyond just Q&As by sparking discussions. As TechCrunch described Quora, "there’s a magic to Quora that has captured Silicon Valley’s imagination. Something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time."

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch (who gave us some love last week!) sat down with Quora's founders and investor to chat about the startup. I found their concept of "reverse blogging" to be pretty interesting:

What makes Quora so special? Why are people raving about it?

I don’t think it’s any one thing, but it’s a bunch of little things. Part of it is the right audience. Instead of just Q&A, we think about this as blogging. Some people call it inverse blogging or reverse blogging. When you write a blog post, you write to your audience. When you write on TechCrunch, you know that these people are expecting techie news about startups.

When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say “there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.”

On a different note, you maaaay have noticed recently that the health care reform bill passed the United States Congress. Whether or not you support the bill, now that it has passed it means the times they are a-changin' in the way businesses provide health insurance for their employees. But what does it mean for small startups? ReadWriteWeb has a channel specifically for entrepreneurs and startups called ReadWriteStart, and they recently detailed the programs, laws, and providers dealing with new health care policies that are relevant to new start-ups. If this applies to you or your company, check it out.

In marketing/advertising news...

We've all seen the "Windows 7 was my idea" ads... want to hear from the creative mind behind them?

CNET News' Ina Fried spoke with David Webster, Microsoft's chief marketing strategist, about the inspiration behind these ads and the process of naming Bing, Microsoft's search engine. Up next for Webster is designing the advertising for Office 2010, which will center around the surprising range of uses that Office programs can have. Here's a (topical!) example: "One friend of Webster does his Passover seder in PowerPoint with embedded sound clips from Charlton Heston in 'The Ten Commandments.'" I for one am interested to see how Webster incorporates his friend's story in the advertising for Office 2010.

Lastly, a big question on everyone's mind since Twitter first stepped on the scene is - how will the giant make their money? paidContent.org systematically reviews Twitter's possible revenue sources, from advertising to e-commerce to mobile deals. What will their advertising scheme look like? We know what it won't look like: Twitter execs agree with our opinion of banner ads (that audiences are blind to them!), saying that “traditional web banner advertising isn’t interesting to us." Word up, Twitter execs.

So that's what we've been reading this week. What about you?

Are you a WordPress-based publisher? Perhaps, you've been wondering why we haven’t built a plugin for WordPress users.

We have been thinking about how to make things easier for you. Things in the pipeline include a shiny new publisher panel and you guessed it, a brand spankin’ new plugin just for the WordPress community.

Before, implementing our technology was a bit on the technical side for average users. Now setting up our in-image advertising solution through WordPress is simple and easy.

Just install a snippet of our code via our WordPress plugin in your pages. Our system matches relevant ads with your images based on your metadata. Once you’ve activated the plugin you’re ready to start earning money!

Download the plugin here and spread the word!

via Jakob Nielsen for Useit.com

At Image Space Media headquarters, we're all pretty big proponents of online advertising (Cash Rules Everything Around Us, after all). We think it's a great way for publishers to financially support their passions and their expressiveness. And, of course, we believe we provide a unique and game-changing way for publishers to use their unique images to get paid.

But not all online advertising is effective online advertising. And it's not just you, getting sick of seeing the same banner ads above the sites you visit every day - it's a proven phenomenon called Banner Burnout, and it has very real implications for publishers and advertisers.

Let the stats do the talking: A study by DoubleClick found that after the fourth impression, CTR rates for banner ads go from 2.7 percent to less than 1 percent. That's pretty abysmal!

Photo via Flickr user jamescastle3

But before you can even worry about click through rates, there is the critical problem of Banner Blindness to deal with. As you can see from the amazing eyetracking studies shown above, created by Jakob Nielsen, the eye is automatically drawn to areas not dominated by ads. As Nielsen writes, "If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."

To combat the Banner B-problems, advertising experts suggest placing banners with animation, flashing bright colors, and cryptic messages at the top of your site. But what if that's not exactly the style you have in mind for your site? Remember, banner ads are not the only ad solution. These are many great advertising strategies to generate revenue - banner ads, Google AdSense and AdWords, in-text ads, Image Space media ads... Given the number of options in your arsenal, it's important to be tactical about your advertising solutions. How do you want your site to appear visually? Check out our online advertising tag for all of our past coverage of the various ways you can make ads work for your site.

Photo by Carlos Zaragoza via stock.xchg

In light of this, we'd like to help publishers like you demystify these terms so you can make the best advertising revenue decisions for your blog. Here are some of the most commonly used terms in online marketing:

Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a web-based revenue sharing practice between advertisers/merchants (affiliate merchants) and online publishers, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model. In a traditional affiliate network the merchant usually has a direct relationship with the publisher.

CPA -- cost-per-action. Also known as pay for performance, CPA is an effective way for merchants to select how they want to pay for their advertising -- by click, impression, sale or other variable. Like traditional affiliate marketing, CPA payouts are based on cost-per-action, where you get paid for leads you generate to their site that perform a specific action.

In a CPA network, the merchant communicates to publishers through the network and does not have direct contact with their affiliates. They also tend to have very transparent metrics with extensive lists of CPCs for search terms.

CPC -- cost-per-click. CPC programs are mostly successful in content-rich websites and blogs. The model is based on the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisements that brings one one visitor to its website.

CPC and CPM advertising is typically viewed as being about brand awareness. Brand conscious advertisers only interested in getting exposure will pay a high profile publisher for impressions or clicks with little regard for their return or investment.

CPM -- cost-per-thousand-impression. An impression is a single instance of an ad appearing on a website. In CPM ad networks, advertisers pay for the amount of traffic that simply view a web page with an advertisement or a pop-up or pop under ad. While CPM does not pay as well as other types of monetization strategies it fits large publishers needs quite well. If you're running a highly trafficked site, the bulk of impressions can easily translate low-paying CPM ads into a profitable revenue stream.

PPC -- pay-per-click, Also known as, pay-per lead or pay-per-sale. PPC implements the affiliate model, offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites.

Have any other online marketing terms that need explaining? Let us know in the comments!