Luminate Corporate Blog

When it Comes to Vacation Photos, Put Down the iPhone. Seriously.

2013-04-12T09:40:46-07:00

Recently I had the opportunity to leave the U.S. for the first time and travel somewhere entirely foreign to me: the beautiful South Pacific country of Thailand. I spent two weeks traversing the country via plane, ferry, bus, taxi, tuk-tuk and my good old two feet. It was an amazingly eye opening experience. I had a lot of fun meeting new people, exploring the country and relaxing with two of my very good friends.

There was something particularly interesting which stood out to me about the locals / visitors / people: the use of technology for photos. While backpacking around the country I noticed that people were actually looking where they were walking! They were slowing down to take in landscapes. They weren't glued to a 4 inch screen! People were stowing their mobile devices and instead were focusing on one piece of technology - an actual camera!

In the U.S. many of us leave the big, bulky DSLR at home and rely only on our iPhones or mobile device cameras to capture life's special moments; after all, it's just SO convenient. My experience while traveling abroad, was that the inverse is true! Very rarely did I see travelers take an iPhone or iPad from their bag and try to capture the beauty Thailand had to offer. Of course the complications & cost of using a phone abroad may have deterred people from using their iPhone, but the lack of non-roaming networks doesn't stop folks from using their iPhones as cameras. I found instead that people kept a DSLR around their neck and slowed down to frame their shots. I was entirely guilty of this, and took over 600 shots on my DSLR during my two week stay.

Although many think that dedicated digital camera use may fade as mobile camera quality improves and devices become ever more convenient, one of my many preconceived thoughts which was enlightened by this travel abroad experience is that no matter how mobile camera quality improves when the shots truly matter to the photographer, convenience gives way to quality and people will take the time to slow down, take a deep breath, and frame up a shot that's worth hanging on a wall back home.

Does a Framed Photo Make You Feel More At Home?

2013-04-10T11:57:00-07:00

A friend shared with me this recent confirmation email from a Los Angeles hotel (highlights added). Now, the folks at Palomar are aware that we all have photos of our kids and pets stored on our phones, right?! But maybe that's the point. In a world where we snap pictures of nearly everything, and collectively share them to digital platforms more than 350 million photos a day, maybe there's something special about a physical photograph, printed, framed and mounted on the wall.

The "naked" chicken and the pitfalls of solely relying on technology for understanding image content

2013-04-09T09:03:00-07:00

By Troy Chevalier

A friend and fellow food enthusiast has a food blog on her cooking website (www.cooked.it). She recently applied to the Google AdSense program, and was rejected with the reason that here site was "Adult Content. This was puzzling, because it is a very G-rated website entirely devoted to cooking. Thinking that perhaps it was a mistake, she re-applied, and was quickly denied again. As you might expect, Google can't human review every site, so they rely on algorithmic techniques, hence the swift—but incorrect—response.

Butterflied roast chicken. Looking at the blog (cooked.it/blog), what caused it to be rejected? One thought was that the section on butterflied roast chicken shows step-by-step how to butterfly a "naked" chicken. Perhaps the chicken was incorrectly matched as skin? Another thought was the text references to the word "breast" (breast bone, breast meat).

Detecting adult content. Luminate also invests considerable effort to automatically detect adult content, using a variety of machine learning techniques:

Classification of text associated with images. Luminate uses a common approach called logistic regression.
Analysis of images. Skin-based detectors are a common approach, where a combination of color and texture information is used to determine whether pixels are skin or not. The size and number of skin regions, plus other interesting features are then used to classify the image type.

What caused Google to reject the food blog? There are many images that include closeups of hands. And there are several images that include wood cutting boards; materials like wood, and sand can sometimes be misclassified as skin. It is likely a combination of things, including the total number of perceived objectionable images.

Technology and human review. Relying solely on algorithmic solutions makes this a very challenging task, so Luminate incorporates a unique combination of technology and human review. Incorporating human review into the process provides additional benefits, such as a feedback loop where information from the human reviewers is used to improve our technology in what is often referred to as semi-supervised learning.

As Digital Ad Rates Fall, Should Publishers Publish More or Less?

2013-04-05T09:01:56-07:00

Last week the San Francicsco Chronicle launched a paid-subscription version its website behind a paywall ($12/month if you don’t already subscribe to the print edition), and the Washington Post plans to do the same later this year. In erecting paywalls, of course, neither qualifies as a trailblazer. Soon it will be hard to find a traditional newspaper that does not charge for access to some or all of its website. But in these early days, it’s also pretty hard to find an example of a newspaper (other than NYT) that’s experiencing gigantic success with its subscription digital product.

Eliza Kern, a 22-year-old reporter for GigaOM and PaidContent, argues that it will be an uphill battle for online publishers hoping to win subscription dollars, especially with respect to her generation of readers:

When I asked if anyone would pay for this content themselves if their parents stopped paying, hardly anyone said they would. The only media that most people said they would pay for was Netflix, and a few said they would subscribe to avoid paywalls on their local newspapers.

While she admits her survey isn’t statistically valid, she is surfacing the larger dilemma faced by nearly every digital publisher. CPMs — cost per thousand ad impressions — for digital advertising have always been lower, in most cases, than CPMs for print advertising. While industry-watchers predict rising CPMs across the Internet as a whole,

the bad news is that this CPM increase will be largely driven by adoption of the “viewable impression” standard, where advertisers pay only for for ads that are visible on the screen. For a lot of publishers this will mean fewer impressions, which could offset some of the CPM gains.

In other words, moderate improvement in CPMs coupled with a larger decline in valid ads per page will leave many publishers with less revenue per thousand pageviews (RPM). So it’s no surprise that the Chronicle and the Washington Post are launching paywalls; every digital publisher wants to bolster the income statement with paid subscriptions.

Nor should it be a surprise that while digital publishers want us to pay a subscription to read their unique, high-quality coverage, many are also chasing increased advertising revenues by churning out more, lower-quality content. On the surface anyway, the logic is simple: If revenues per pageview (the R in RPM) are going down, then increase the number of pageviews (the M) on which you can sell ads. The Huffington Post, for example, claims to publish between 1600 and 2000 articles a day, which works out to one new content nugget every minute. (Or there is the ad heavy / content light approach at Seattle PI.) It’s a great strategy for boosting pageviews — there’s something for everybody, there’s lots to share in social media, and there are headlines that will show up in search results for almost anything anyone could search for. But it’s also hard to maintain quality at a factory that pumps out widgets with that kind of velocity. What’s great for topline pageviews, I’d argue, isn’t likely to capture bottom-line reader immersion or a desire to pay attention with any kind of intensity — the kind of intensity that motivates us to pay for a publication because we can’t live without it.

(Source: Crowd Science.)

Nor does it capture the kind of reader attention that makes advertising work. The volume strategy drives more ad impressions and unique users, but the amount of time a reader might spend with each content piece will almost certainly decline — and with it, ad effectiveness. Click-through rates at Facebook, for example, are sliding as the siteincreases the number of ads per page. And if the pageview-chase increases ad impressions faster than ad dollars migrate online, publishers will face further downward pressure on rates.

I’m a fan of charging readers for great content, because I abhor the idea of a mediocre-content world. But before you ask readers for money, you first need an editorial formula that is so unique and so valuable that readers show signs of life-threatening addiction. That’s a tough aspiration if you’re banging out a story a minute, or if you’re fluffing your editorial output with wire stories that readers can find elsewhere. In my own experience, at publishers such as CNET and Digg, the let’s-pump-out-more-headlines approach inevitably leads to a corresponding dip in the engagement numbers — not exactly an equation for long-term business success if you count on renewals from advertisers and a growing audience of paid subscribers.

I wonder if it’s time for a more thoughtful approach to digital publishing. Figure out the stories you can own, the beats you can cover better than anyone else, and let the Internet’s content factories have the rest. You’ll lose out on a bunch of low-value ad impressions, but eventually advertisers will stop paying for low-value ad impressions anyway. In the meantime, you might just build a relationship with readers that opens their wallets.

(A version of this post originally appeared on Digiday under the title Modern Publishing’s Death Spiral.)

Smile: People Like Your Picture More Than Your Words

2013-03-22T15:09:55-07:00

By Chas Edwards (Originally published in AllThingsD)

On March 7, Facebook announced a major overhaul to its News Feed, the scrolling page of friend-news where we spend the bulk of our Facebook time. The central change: Facebook is making room for bigger pictures.

It’s a logical move when you look at the data. In November 2011, one-fifth of posts uploaded to newsfeeds were photos. Today, every other status update is a photo. My math friends tell me it that it’s hard to meaningfully show percentage gains when you start with a really big number. Even with my quantitative limitations, I have to believe Facebook qualifies. Last year it told investors (as part of its IPO roadshow) that users were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day, and from that very large starting point photo activity just jumped 150 percent in 15 months. So much for the law of large numbers.

If you’re a brand, though, it’s not the fact that photo-enabled devices will soon outnumber humans on the planet, or that we’re piping all those pictures into social media. The important trend is that consumers are looking at them. In other words, your art-directed fashion spreads have a lot more competition these days.

There was a time when professional photography had a monopoly on our attention. When mass media meant national magazines, TV networks and big-city newspapers, only deep-pocketed corporations could afford access to large audiences. Back then it made economic sense to build your story around professional-grade photography: A single print ad would reach millions of readers, so a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on art and photography chewed up only a negligible percentage of a campaign’s costs. And for a few generations, this approach worked great.

It turns out, though, that cost-to-produce and magnitude-of-consumer-delight don’t plot analogous curves in an Excel graph. In fact, it’s hard to find a direct correlation between the two. A photo that captures something important or interesting or timely wins our attention — regardless of who took it or how much it cost to make. It also turns out the spans of our attention are shrinking. Google economist Hal Varian observed as far back as 2010 — before SnapChat, and back when we uploaded a mere 30 million photos to Facebook every day — that we pay less attention to stuff when we consume it online. “The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.”

So corporate storytellers need to master a new narrative technique. It’s as if they need to shed those florid sentences that played so well in Victorian novels and dial it down to the Hemingway-esque. The good news: This new approach to storytelling still employs a language in which brands are fluent: Photos. There are three ways that brands should modify their visual storytelling.

One, feeds move faster than print magazines, so you need to tell your story in a series of frequent episodes, anecdotes and updates — not the grand gestures of Ogilvy or Draper. Photos are the currency of social media, but it’s a currency doled out in nickels, not twenty-dollar bills.

Two, let photos do more of the talking for you. Humans process visual information much faster than we process text. And when we’re online (remember those stats from Hal Varian), we navigate more quickly from story to story. If you’re going to capture attention in a digital landscape, you have to do it fast. So steal a page from the playbooks used by Pinterest, Flipboard, USA Today’s new design or the NYT’s TimesCast: Use visual content instead of words to invite consumers into the story.

Three — need I say it? — let them interact with your story, let them re-mix your assets and choose their own adventures. Let them steal your photos so they can more easily share them with friends. Let them explore inside your images to find links to products, deals and related links. And let them contribute their own. If the Web conversation is going visual, encourage them to talk to you in the local dialect — images snapped on their phones looking for a place to be uploaded.

Chas Edwards joined Luminate, the worldwide leader in interactive images, in 2010 as chief revenue officer and head of publisher development. Prior to Luminate, Chas served as publisher and CRO at Digg, and before that he was the co-founder (with John Battelle), publisher and chief revenue officer at Federated Media Publishing (FM), a next-generation media and publishing company that develops content marketing strategies for leading brand marketers. He blogs at http://ChasNote.com and @chasnote.