AdBrite, the company known for its advertising network of the same name, is obviously not scared to delve into a different territory. They’ve launched BritePic, which enables you to add several interesting features to your images. Instead of simply using the tag, you embed the image link in BritePic code, which uses some Javascript to add interactivity to the image.
BritePic enables you to put your logo on the image, as well as embed descriptions and ads into it. Additionally, every image gets an interactive menu which enables visitors to zoom into it, or email, link or embed the image. BritePic doesn’t host the images: they merely provide the additional features. Most importantly, all this is done in a tasty, unobtrusive way, and is not likely to scare any visitors away; it can only enrich their experience on your site. Here’s a full list of all the current and upcoming features, taken from the BritePic site:
* Email this image
* Link to this image
* Embed this image (you still get the ad revenue, even if your pic is embedded elsewhere)
* Zoom in and out (see demo)
* Captions that slide out when you hover over the pic
* Ads from AdBrite
* Link the image to another URL
* Rate this image (coming soon)
* Subscribe to RSS (coming soon)
* View gallery (coming soon)
* Discuss this image (coming soon)
* Accessibility features for visually impaired (coming soon)
The good sides are obvious, but there are several possible downsides to BritePic. First that comes to mind is SEO. If you care about it - and every webmaster should at least cover the basics - you want Google to recognize your content. And I bet that Google likes the standard tag better than a Javascript snippet. Furthermore, if you have a site with a lot of images, the additional code can increase the size of your HTML files quite significantly. In some situations, it will probably slow things down. Lastly, by using BritePic, you become dependent on this company and their servers with regards to a very basic feature of your site - images. There’s a number of scenarios when you simply might not to go that route.
Still, there’s no denying that BritePic offers a nice and easy way to add interactivity to your images. There’s no doubt in my mind that visitors will love BritePic-enabled images better than standard ones. If the possible downsides above don’t concern you, give it a go; and if you’re already registered with AdBrite, you don’t even have to register again. You can see BritePic in action below or over on Photolicious.
I don’t get it.
The basic features like captions, links and email would be trivial to add to any site. The more complicated stuff like zoom and rating images isn’t all that valuable to most blogs. (If rating images is an important aspect of your site you won’t want to hand it over to AdBrite.) And I can’t image a lot of blogs wanting to allow other sites to embed their images and eat up their bandwidth.
Mhh cool…but…when I had AdBlockPlus switched on, I can’t see anything…
@ok: well, the features are neat in the sense that it’s very easy to add them. Zooming might not be a killer feature, but it’s well done and it’s nice enough. But as I’ve said in the post, there are several problems with this approach. My guess is that it will be used in some cases, but it won’t become a general trend.