PicLens Offers News Publishers a Way to Immerse Readers in Photos
Important Details: Photographs have long been an undervalued asset on the web. Print publishers — especially newspapers — create many photos along with the stories that define their businesses, but it’s been difficult to value those photos in the internet age. They help on story pages, providing a visual point of entry, as designers like to say, yet most publishers have not been able to yield significant new revenue streams from them. That’s why a new development — PicLens — offered by the CoolIris company is worth a look. CoolIris’s core product — Previews — allows users to preview web links on a page without leaving the page they are viewing.
PicLens plays with the ways that readers take in photographs. Instead of seeing a photo as an adjunct to a story, PicLens makes photo watching an immersive experience, bringing the photo up fluidly full-screen, once a user clicks on it. It makes photographs seem a bit more interactive and for truly involving images (the big football goal, your grandchild’s first smile or a user-generated shot catching a politician off-guard) it makes still photography more of an experience.
Silicon Valley start-up PicLens is already integrated, as we’d expect, with the main photo sites of the day, from Flickr to Photobucket to Facebook to Bebo. Planned add-ons include the ability to share PicLens pages with communities and friends. The company, business development director Hongzhe Sun told Outsell, is also talking with several news publishers about its use. The product is now free to use, with an ad rev share model contemplated as it gains traction.
Implications: PicLens’ commercial applicability is hard to gauge. Certainly in a visual-forward, rich-media age — look at at everything from 24-inch computer monitors to HDTV to the new attraction of web video — it makes a new visual statement for photographs. Given that photos are a core asset of publishers, it’s worth thinking about how products like a PicLens can re-energize photo value.
Publishers have tried a number of things over the years to enhance value. The New York Times is one of the leaders in selling iconic historical photos, building a $5 million-plus annual revenue line. Other publishers have tested that proposition, selling current photo reprints, testing user-generated photo uploading for community sitelets and, most widely, creating photo galleries. For photo galleries themselves — attractive to advertisers for sponsorships — a PicLens-like application may have “wow” value. It’s an area it would be good to see news publishers pursue early on, rather than play catch-up later on, as has happened so often.
In any event, looking as they are for new revenue streams, it’s worth publishers taking a look and re-thinking how to harness the value of one of their more costly and plentiful assets, next to the written word itself.