Adrants — Photo Site Shares Ad Revenue With Users ImageGravy, a new photo sharing site has launched and will share advertising revenue with the photographers who post their work there. Not sure how much potential is here but it sounds interesting.
From their home page: “ImageGravy would like to introduce the first of its kind, revenue sharing image hosting. By using ImageGravy you not only have the ability to host your images for free, but can be PAID to do so.
When you send your family & friends to view your images hosted by ImageGravy you will earn cash. It doesn’t get much easier than that, sign up today and upload some of your favorite pictures to share with others absolutely free! To learn more click below, or check out our FAQ page for a quick answer.
From their “how much can I earn” section: “Earnings vary each month based off the amount of income ImageGravy generates. Once this number is finalized a percentage of that is distributed throughout ImageGravy members depending on how many image views they have accrued.
For example, if in month one ImageGravy calculates to distribute $1,000 to our members, we will first tally up the total number of image views for that month. Using these two numbers we can determine the respective payouts for each user. If there were a total of 500,000 image views for the month, image views will equate to $0.002 each (1,000 divided by 500,000), or $2 per 1000 image views.
Although we do not disclose the revenue share, we do display the amount paid for previous pay periods in the members section. Our goal is to pay out enough to keep users happy, while still being able to sustain development costs, hosting fees, salaries, etc.”
One other little wrinkle:
“Refer users and earn 5%. Each time you refer a new user you will earn 5% of all their image views forever! Use the link code below to start referring today! (By tomorrow there will be a tally of all referred members image views for your account).”
To test the service out I tried to post a few of my images here but received the following upload error: “Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/jasonr/public_html/myAccount/gallery/viewGallery.php on line 55”.
The site does seem fairly ad intensive and is nowhere near as elegant as Flickr. It also lacks a bulk uploader which would make it very tedious to upload your photos to the site 5 at a time. It also would appear that there is not a general site of all public photos and that the only way for people to find your photos is through the link that you are provided for your gallery. This would seem to limit discovery by others outside your immediate circle of contact.
The site also requires you to enter your address to register. While I can see why they would need this info to send you a check, it would seem to be something that people could do afterwards and people might not want to give out this personal information prior to checking out the site. They also request your Pay Pal email address but don’t require it for registration.
If the company were smart they’d figure out a better way for people to upload say 3,000 photos with a bulk uploader at once, figure out how to get these images indexed in the search engines for image search, make members pages available to everyone publicly and develop a ranking or rating type of a mechanism to highlight their best photography similar to Flickr’s interestingness.
Good idea. Emailed the admin about the lack of features and minor problems. Looks like they are just in beta mode and most everything you mentioned is to be added. Looks like this could be the next big thing in a couple months when all the bugs are worked out and they have everything to offer.
Sharing advertising revenue is way too incentive to click on google ads because advertisers don’t want to pay for that kind of traffic. It may be a good idea to attract people to use their service, but I do think it’s not a good idea of business…