Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

     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?

> 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.

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

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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