

Instagram vs Twitter: A Solution - screeley
http://blog.embed.ly/the-horror

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citricsquid

         There is no way to monetize images embedded on other sites
    

Let's pretend the solution instagram have for this is the same model Twitter
has, "featured instagrams" for brands. A very basic and simple revenue model.

    
    
        So Instagram, let's talk about these embeds. How about making them an 
        iframe or script tag embed like Twitter? 
    

How does this solve the revenue problem? The point of Twitter controlling
tweets is so they control the feed, if Instagram are copying Twitter (with
pulling the content back to their site) wouldn't the obvious conclusion be
they want to control the users feed (where the money is) and therefore
embedding the comments page on Twitter solves absolutely nothing?

I don't understand what problem the author thinks embedding the comments
solves, unless there's something about the comments that makes the instagrams
monetisable?

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Terretta
> _There is no way to monetize images embedded on other sites_

On the contrary, there's an incredibly simple way to monetize images embedded
on other sites: put an interstitial ad in front of them or on them.

Modern browsers grok the mime type regardless of DOS "extension", so when a
JPEG is linked from a monetizable site, say, Twitter, dynamically generate and
serve a two frame GIF instead, with the first frame being a "brand awareness"
ad, and the second frame being the desired image. Or be nice, and make the
first frame be the desired image, and the second be the brand awareness ad.

Alternatively, serve up a normal JPEG with the original image rendered into a
polaroid frame, with the polaroid label text being the desired ad copy.

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screeley
Yes, you can do that. Anyone successfully done this?

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Terretta
Well, we used to successfully dynamically stitch a JPEG onto the front or back
or middle of a video to make a VOD have an unskippable ad regardless of target
device. We did that back in the Windows Media (.wmv) days, haven't tried it
with H.264. But this should be easier.

We use a similar principle to generate dynamic thumbnails. Our VOD hosting
customers can call a video URL with a query string specifying time offset and
size and we generate a JPEG thumbnail on the fly from the closest keyframe of
the H.264 file, storing the thumbnails in an intermediate cache layer. Works
great, and beats keeping a bazillion thumbs managed when the source media is
changed or deleted.

Generating an ad should be no harder than that. Easier, I'd think, since most
of our time is spent seeking to the keyframe of a 2 hour movie.

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noamsml
... and, of course, there's the fact that Facebook owns Instagram.

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zipop
Not sure, but I don't think it's about improving ones sleep. It's about
screwing Twitter.

