There is a new advertising mechanism being offered by AdBrite called BritePic which allows Web authors to place advertising on or around photos on any Web site. However, Web authors need to be aware that this service can have some fairly drastic consequences.
The way BritePic works is, you simply replace a direct link to an image with a JavaScript link from AdBrite that includes the image link. Anywhere on your web site that you would normally insert an image, you now insert the BritePic link.
The Good
- It basically works as advertised.
- It adds a few slightly amusing features to images.
- It might possibly convert into some ad clicks, which then equal some revenue.
The Bad
- Your images will load much, much slower. See example screen cap video which was taken directly from the BritePic home page. The browser used for this was Opera and the cache was cleared immediately prior to the page load. This was also taken at 2am, and earlier in the day I noticed it was twice as slow as what is captured on this video.
- None of your images will be available to visitors who do not have Javascript enabled.
- You will not be able to specify “ALT” text, dimensions, or TITLEs for images.
- Without height and width attributes assigned to images, Web browsers cannot insert placeholders. This means that the page shifts all the text up and down while image are loading, making it impossible to start reading content until every image loads. Try this yourself on the BritePic homepage. Refresh it repeatedly while watching the text below both images.
- Without those image elements you will miss out on a substantial amount Image Search traffic. This could cost you 50% of your visitors or more depending on how many images you have.
As an example see the attached screen shot that shows over 180 visitors I received in just a few days as a result of image searches. With over 600 images on my site you can see the impact that would have on traffic.
What kind of a click through rate would you need to have in order to be willing to give up 15,000 + visitors in less than a week? And do you believe your visitors will be willing to suffer all of the additional consequences while you’re at it? (Maybe for free porn, but not much else.)
Summary
I would not recommend this ad method because it will:
- Result in a dramatically impaired user experience
- Decrease a site’s search traffic
- Make any site less accessible
I’m not aware of any other service offerings that can do this much damage to a Web site all at once just for implementing it.
As a result of a comment below that Image loading should still work without JavaScript enabled I am providing a screen capture of the unaltered BritePic home page using Internet Explorer 6 with Javascript disabled. Clearly, the image does not display. Furthermore, here is the source code embedded in the page. Note there is no NOSCRIPT element.
<script>
britepic_id = "278730";
britepic_src = "http://files.adbrite.com/images/doggy.jpg";
britepic_show_ads = 1;
britepic_width = "355";
britepic_caption = "No pots were harmed in the taking of this picture.";
britepic_keywords = "dog, puppies, pets, cute, adorable, technology, pictures, images";
</script>
<script src="http://www.britepic.com/britepic.js"></script>
I have been running the britepic ad on one of my sites for some time now.
I have not made a red cent .
I have ran adsense on my all of my sites and adbrite at an equal view point.
for every $20 I make with adsense, I make $3.5 with adbrite.
I am done with adbrite. They do not hold up their end of the deal, and their ads on a video game website talking about denture glue and how to get hot women or buy a car, way off from content relation.
I have used britepic and i made more money from it then all my other ads.
Also as far as users not linking it, When i stopped using it because i thought that people did not like it most of my users were asking what had happened to the britepic.
So I guess it is all an opinion, but it worked out good for me.
What I’d like to find is something open source that does the same as britepic for my images yet gives me FULL control where I can put my own text ads in (or sell ads to others) and have my own transparent logo in the corner.
For example, I have a travel site. For a photo of a hotel, it would be neat to have a text ad which links to making a reservation to that hotel and where it can be done on the page without redirecting to another page.
I know there’s a way to do this somehow.
I’m leery of britepic with the limited options for advertisers.
Also, the founder is the same guy who created F*CKEDCOMPANY. Not exactly who I want to be affiliated with.
Philip,
There is one semi-inaccuracy in my post which was self-inflicted by AdBrite. That is, after actually logging into the site and using the “Instant HTML Generator” I now see that it does indeed create a NOSCRIPT element. However, as I’ve added to the documentation in the post above, BritePic.com does not include the NOSCRIPT element within the page. And therefore when I disabled JavaScript to see what would happen, nothing did.
I believe that my initial research and assumption was therefore reasonable, and you can expect that others thought the same thing even though they did not share their observations. What would be unreasonable would be to assume that I, or anyone else, would go any further than your home page to learn about the NOSCRIPT generation within the tool.
With regards to the ALT text issue:
——————————————–
Caption text is not at all the same as Alt text. If you had read the article that I linked to regarding ALT text on HTMLHelp.com you would learn why it is imperative. ALT text is used by people with disabilities, most browsers display it in the whitespace before an image loads, and search engines use it to help index pages. A Javascript caption does none of that.
With regards to the height and width image attributes:
——————————————–
You are actually wrong. Your Instant HTML generator applies a proprietary height and width attribute only to the SCRIPT element – which has absolutely no bearing on the point I was making.
BritePic does not include image height and width attributes. Furthermore, the generateor doesn’t even display those options unless you select “more options”, and this only works with Javascript enabled. And although I could personally figure out how to do all of this, we are talking about the average Webmaster here, so your generator is all they have given the fact that you don’t even have any tutorials. (Remove that link by the way. Who puts “coming soon” on their site? You either have it, or you don’t.)
The W3C provides the following commentary on height and width attributes:
I explained this in much simpler terms in the post above, and also referred readers to use your home page as a demonstration of this effect. This fact is undeniable. Even if a browser does indeed offer Javascript support I’m not sure if you can specify height and width on a script to hold the place while the page loads anyway. Certainly the BritePic homepage doesn’t do it.
With regards to the speed of image loading:
——————————————–
Inserting huge images into pages so that they can be constrained into smaller boxes and then “zoomed” to full size is actually even worse. This will impact the user experience in 100% of all cases as they have to download far more data. It was better when I simply thought your servers were slow because I assumed you would eventually throw more hardware at the problem to solve that issue. I was only providing peer pressure.
I suggest that if you want to demonstrate that your script does not impact the user experience that you load the exact same image side-by-side, with and without the script, which is what 99.x% of the people would have assumed you were doing on that page anyway. It is deceptive to otherwise suggest that simply adding the script to existing images will allow them to zoom nicely.
Of course, when it comes to page rendering speed, which is as important as image rendering, let’s not forget that in order to use BritePic one must replace a single Image link with at least 5 times the code. If there were a page with many images this would signifigantly increase the HTML page size, which would also slow down rendering.
Summary:
——————————————–
So, if AdBrite wants to make BritePic a service which even I would use, you should do the following:
Finally, in the future, might I suggest you double check everything before you show up on someone’s blog and tell them to “do their homework”. AdBrite would have been better served had you researched the points I made and come back with the ways in which you intend to address the deficiencies. You may have also used my contact form to gather more detail privately.
John
Peter – Yes. That alone is reason enough for Webmasters not to implement this. The fact that even people who do have scripting enabled will have a poor user experience is just bonus.
John
Thanks for the review, but you should do your homework before writing next time :)
> None of your images will be available to visitors who do
> not have Javascript enabled
Wrong. The NOSCRIPT tags ensure that people without Javascript still see the image.
> You will not be able to specify “ALT/TITLE†text
But we let you specify “CAPTION” text, which is kinda the same thing — appears when you mouseover the pics.
> You will not be able to specify dimensions
Wrong. You can specify height and/or width.
> Your images will load much slower
Wrong. The way it works, Javascript shows the jpeg first, before ever contacting BritePic servers or loading Flash. The reason the BritePic on britepic.com loads a little slower than the non-BritePic, is because the BritePic uses a jpeg that is twice the resolution, in order to show off the zoom feature. If we used the same jpeg in both pics (britepic and non-britepic), they would have virtually the same load time.
> Google image search
I think they’ll index the stuff in the NOSCRIPT tags, but I am not sure.
But everything else you wrote was accurate, including making money from ads and other BritePic features.
Disclaimer: I work at AdBrite/BritePic. :)
this is horrible
i have noscript, so i would not see any images on pages that have this