Monetize Your Web Images with ISM

Image Space Media has an interesting idea: overlay images with advertisements that appear only when users hover their cursor over the image. Try it out by hovering your cursor over the larger images on this site. They’re currently calling it beta, so there’s every opportunity they’ll improve over time.


It already seems to work well, though. Hover your cursor over an image (such as my picture of the New York City Skyline at night), and an advertisement rises up from the bottom, covering about one-quarter of the image, as shown here (scaled down to fit this page).

There’s also a sharing icon in the upper-left corner that you can turn off. If the user clicks it, a full-page overlay appears that provides links to sharing on Facebook , Twitter, and e-mail. Several ads appear on the page, too, and it shows you popular and recent images. This picture shows a scaled-down version of the sharing page, however, since I’m currently using ISM on this site, you can experience it for yourself by hovering your cursor over it.

Once you’re hovering, you can click the advertisement or just move your mouse away. Once you move your mouse, the advertisement shrinks back down to one line. You have to reload the page if you want the ad to completely disappear.

Image Space Media ads sample

It’s smart enough to ignore small images, such as those you might use in menus. Occasionally, the advertisement wasn’t flush with the bottom of the image, but I’m sure they’ll work that problem at.

I run one of the Web’s largest photo albums and use Google AdSense to make a few bucks on it. I’d be thrilled if I could make a few more, and these ads are actually less intrusive than Google AdSense because they don’t take up any screen space and don’t even appear by default. It took about 12 hours for me to be approved, and only about 10 minutes to add the necessary JavaScript to my sites.

Two weeks later, my experience with ISM has been good. They start slow–very slow. In fact, due to what I imagine is a bug in the reporting, they show you as not making any money in your current day–I’m betting they only calculate earnings after midnight.

Here’s the last couple of weeks of earnings. You can ignore that dip on 3/22, as I removed the ads to determine whether they had an impact on site performance and page views per visitor (it was negligible, but I will test it again in the future):


The most important thing to notice is the gradual increase in earnings. Actual page views stayed relatively constant throughout this time period, but the earnings per ad (eCPM) gradually increased from $0.05 to $0.45. Their site warns you that it takes a while to get to know what works on your site, and that does seem to be the case. I’m now averaging $0.44 eCPM for my indie stock photo site and $0.39 for my technology blog. That’s nowhere in the ballpark of Google AdSense, but it’s a nice bonus on top of AdSense.

In summary, try out ISM on your blog or image site. In my experience, it makes a few bucks without significantly impacting the user experience.