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!

Welcome to Image Space Media's newsletter for December 2009. HAPPY HOLIDAYS EDITION!!

WIN THIS CAMERA!

As usual, a big thank you to our publishers using Image Space Media's technology in beta, and for your feedback. Your input helps us identify what areas we need to improve upon. With your help and feedback we've been steadily working to improve our technology. If you have any comments or questions please send them to info@imagespacemedia.com.

in this issue:

1. when can I expect my paycheck?
2. publisher survey
3. image tagging tips
4. WIN A CAMERA!

when can I expect my paycheck?

One of the (many) great things about Image Space Media's service is that we run a different payout schedule than other ad networks. Where publishers might expect to receive a check in the mail from a different service every 90 days, at Image Space Media we pay out to our publishers the first of every month with a minimum payout of $25. And, you have the option to use PayPal, checks sent in the mail, or wire service. To our publishers using PayPal, remember to make sure your information is up to date. We want our publishers to earn their revenue as quickly and easily as possible!

publisher survey

At Image Space Media we're always interested in hearing your feedback, but in this issue we have a special question for our publishers. Would you be interested in a "Share This" tool that links to networking and bookmarking sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.? The positive is that sharing features drive more traffic to your images. Where would you like this option to appear? As a part of the Image Space ad? Above the ad? In the corner of your image? We're in the early stages of development on a sharing feature so your feedback is invaluable. Send us your thoughts here

image tagging tips

In last month's newsletter we explained our innovative taxonomy engine that matches relevant ads to your images, providing higher CTR and CPC rates. To take advantage of our technology, we recommend tagging your images with good, descriptive terms. So... what exactly are good and descriptive tags? Great question!

When you're writing a post for your website and you post an image, you have the option to tag that image through our Image Manager or through the "alt" tags in your html code. Check out an example of "alt" tags used in a recent blog post of ours (highlighted). These tags are words or terms, separated by commas, that match our image of a working mother with one of our ads. To see how that works in matching ads to images, check out the finished blog post here. In general, the tags are meant to create the most relevancy between ads and images.

Here's another example: If I'm creating a post about the most picturesque places to take pictures in New York City, a great way to tag the images that accompany my post would be to include "photography," "new york," the location of the image, the type of camera if I mention it in the post, and other words that really get to the heart of the image. This may mean that I would get ads on my images for both photography paraphernalia and travel savings -- two relevant categories that have good CPC and CTR rates.

Some general tips:

• Don't try to guess what types of ads will apply to your image. Just try to represent the essence of your image.
• Check your spelling! It may sound silly, but "camara" when you mean "camera" won't get the job done.
• Remember that tagging your images can lead to more traffic and better search engine optimization! (Read more about metadata and SEO here).
• The more tags the better!
  

If you need help with the technical side of adding tags, please don't hesitate to contact us at info@imagespacemedia.com.

our very first publisher contest

GIVE US YOUR BEST IMAGE TAGGING TIPS!

All this exciting talk of images leads us to our first publisher contest! We hope you're as excited as we are. As you can tell from our discussion above, the art of tagging images is not a precise one. So - what special tricks do you use? What's your best tagging strategy? Send us your time-tested technique for getting the most relevant ads for your images here, and we'll publish the best advice at our blog. Even better, we'll send the publisher with the best advice their very own Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD! So. Exciting. Don't forget to send us your tagging tips!

Again, thank you to all of our publishers for using Image Space Media. As the exclusive provider of in-picture advertisements, we are happy to partner with you to bring incremental revenue to the image space on your site. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any of your comments or questions. With your help and feedback we've been steadily working to improve our technology.