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Stipple Network Allows Publishers to Make Money Effortlessly
One of the universal concerns for independent publishers is how best to make money off their website. Some sell ad space direct to interested parties, others may use affiliate programs from places such as Amazon and Zappos, and still others could partake of the Google Ad tools to host text-based advertisements. However, there’s a relatively new player in the digital space in a San Francisco-based company that’s making it easier than ever to make money off your website.
Stipple is a small tech company with several big offerings, all revolving around easy monetization of editorial images. There’s Lens, a program that allows major photo agencies such as Buzz Foto to upload their images for monetization; Pipeline, which allows brands to mark images that contain their products with links back to the product; Network, for publishers looking to make money off the editorial images placed on their site; and Want, which allows visitors to a website to “want list” the items offered in the images.
It’s of course Network that publishers should be paying attention to, especially if they run a plethora of images owned by national photo agencies. Pay attention they have, according to Stipple CEO and Founder Rey Flemings, who said there are about 1,300 publishers currently signed onto the Network program. Among those publishers is celebrity gossip site TMZ.com, which uses the Network service to make money off the images of celebrities it publishes to its website. This allows users looking at the site to purchase the precise item in the photograph as opposed to many other photo-monetization services that, according to Flemings, allow you to “get what’s similar to the photo but not what’s in the photo.”
Despite this revolutionary move in monetizing images, Flemings maintains that Stipple’s novelty isn’t in the fact that they’ve effectively monetized images but rather that the Network program is infinitely scalable. In addition to this successful scalability, Stipple Network allows you to mark, or “annotate” as Flemings calls it, every portion of an editorial photo. Other software that monetizes images only allows partial annotation.
One of the other benefits of Stipple, besides the ability to mark any part of the image, is that monetization is practically automatic. A publisher subscribing to Networkk need only select an image from the Stipple database and plug it into their website. Each image uploaded to Lens by photo agencies comes pre-annotated to publishers subscribing to Network. No searching around for the particular jacket Justin Timberlake is wearing, or for the designer of Anne Hathaway’s red carpet dress before you can monetize your image.
According to Flemings, in fact, national editorial images in the categories of sports, news, entertainment, and celebrities should all come pre-annotated. This makes it easy for publishers subscribing to Network to monetize their site. Simply sign up for the service, find the image you like, and insert it onto your site. With that minimal amount of work, you the publisher have already partially monetized your site. Stipple can even be used on local images with a little work on the publisher’s part of annotating the products inside.
Stipple is free to publishers, and the process to take advantage of this simple monetization is relatively painless. When publishers first sign up for Network, they’re asked a few simple questions and then they receive a free account for the site. From there, the insertion of a simple line of Javascript code—akin to activating Google Analytics, according to Flemings—is all a publisher needs in order to use Network. Once the code is installed, Networkbehaves seamlessly on a website.
Another similarity to Google Analytics is Stipple’s ability to track where web visitors are clicking on images via a real-time tracking system. This allows publishers to see immediately what’s working on their particular website; according to Flemings there’s a 12 percent clickthrough on products and a 6 percent one on people — astounding rates of engagement. When you add in the concept of “notes,” little bits of text that can even be placed on the X button to close a window, the engagement becomes even greater. The “notes” are extremely popular with news content, according to Flemings.
About 140,000 national editorial images are added to the Stipple database every day, and each of those come pre-annotated for publishers to use. Stipple’s tools are flexible as well, however, and allow publishers to also annotate their own images uploaded into the Stipple database. Between its successful scalability, and this opportunity to monetize even local images, it’s not hard to see the change that Stipple has wrought for web publishers.