Digital Innovation Digital Publishing
6 mins read

Image streaming: Can it truly meet publishers’ needs?

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By using image streaming, publishers can ensure the authenticity of online images, as well as protect against theft and misuse using just a line of code. Moreover, publishers can generate additional revenue by placing relevant contextual advertisements within the streamed images. Jennifer Clements, Global Publishing Director of SmartFrame Technologies, explains more…

SmartFrame Technologies is on a mission to redefine imagery standards within publishing. The start-up, backed by independent investors including prominent names from Fidelity Investments, J.P. Morgan and others, has a straightforward proposition: by streaming images as opposed to taking the more traditional approach of uploading them, publishers, advertisers, and content owners can benefit from a more transparent and just ecosystem.

Joining the operation is recently appointed Global Publishing Director, Jennifer Clements, who is tasked with bringing SmartFrame’s solution to a broader range of publishers. Clements has extensive publishing experience, serving most recently as Commercial Director of Parenting at Immediate Media Co, where she oversaw all commercial lines into brands across MadeForMums and junior websites.

The aim is to drive more transparency up and down the media supply chain, building a more equitable and efficient image sourcing and licensing model to empower content owners. Knowing the industry, it’s a vision I’m excited to bring to life.

Jennifer Clements, Global Publishing Director, SmartFrame Technologies

WNIP caught up with Clements to find out the multitude of ways in which image streaming can benefit publishers.

Why should publishers consider streaming images rather than using static formats?

Streaming images presents myriad benefits to publishers.

One of the main advantages is cost, and this is twofold. First, publishers are able to access and embed images without any fees. This is in exchange for occasional ads being served inside images, in contrast to the traditional image-licensing model. It’s easy to end up using conventional images outside of their licensing terms, but the transparency and visibility over streaming images mean that litigation fees from incorrect/out-of-license usage are avoided.

With a raft of interactive features integrated into streamed images as standard – allowing users to zoom into images, view them in full screen, read integrated captions for context and share them with others, among other things – images are far more engaging than they would otherwise be, which helps with dwell times and boosts the overall user experience.

The fact that images are controlled, rather than just easily duplicated and used without any traceability, means that publishers also get to see exactly which images are popular and create engagement, and this can be used to better inform future content and campaigns.

Jennifer Clements, Global Publishing Director, SmartFrame Technologies

Publishers get their own data panel, and this contains a wealth of information on engagement, reach and more. Should they have their own images, these would also be protected against theft and misuse.

Jennifer Clements, Global Publishing Director, SmartFrame Technologies

Publishers can also profit from in-image advertising that’s displayed right in the heart of editorial content. This advertising is contextually relevant to the image and page on which it’s found, and it’s far more likely to interest and engage users than advertising served by invasive behavioural tracking, which will soon no longer be possible with the death of the third-party cookie.

While the placement and display of the ads mean they have great impact, ads are only shown momentarily, which allows users to continue enjoying the content they came to see and maintains a great user experience. Not only does this help keep website environments cohesive, but it also means a site can be designed without banners and MPUs interfering with the page architecture.   

Is it going to affect Google indexing and SEO? Will a streamed image increase page weight?

SmartFrame is designed to have zero negative impact on search engine indexing. Conventionally, an image would appear in image search results, but this obviously leaves it exposed. With SmartFrame, you have a watermarked, low-resolution thumbnail that points to the SmartFrame and keeps all original images protected – and the Google Image Search team has confirmed that this has no impact on positioning.

Streaming images, meanwhile, provides a significant benefit over conventional image display in terms of page weight. Because the image is being streamed to the site – and because only the detail required by the user at the time is transmitted – there is no requirement for a website to host a high-resolution image. This keeps things light and does not affect page speed or user experience like a conventional image might. The presence of SmartFrames should never adversely impact Google PageSpeed scores.

There are also environmental benefits to this setup. SmartFrame does not rely on programmatic networks and does not fill images with low-quality/placeholder ads, so it eliminates the heavy traffic from programmatic exchanges, which helps to conserve energy. The major part of SmartFrame’s cloud infrastructure is run on Amazon Web Services (AWS); most of SmartFrame’s traffic is served in the UK, EU, and US AWS regions, which are powered by over 95% renewable energy and are set to be 100% renewable by 2025.

Is it visible to Google bots?

Yes – SmartFrame allows images to be indexed by Google and other search engines but hides them from malicious bots that may try to scrape the contents of a website. You can even see the last time specific search engines indexed an image. Incidentally, the SmartFrame itself does not appear in image search results; instead, it’s a low-resolution preview thumbnail that leads to the page on which the SmartFrame is embedded.

How easy will it be to choose or source an image? Does the editorial team have to go through each individual library?

Our ultimate goal is to provide a single library that’s tailored towards publishers’ needs. Currently, as a number of different content owners will have assets handled by a single Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, it’s possible to source images from a number of content owners within a single space. Furthermore, publishers who specialise in a particular genre won’t need to search through content from all our partners, as much of it may not be relevant to them. Instead, they will focus their search from one or two libraries. The fact that a single image will typically have extensive metadata appended also improves the likelihood of a more specific match when searching. 

Does image formatting and cropping happen at the front-end or back-end?

Images that are converted into SmartFrame images are processed as soon as they are uploaded. This process involves breaking down an image into individual pieces – much like a jigsaw – which allows only the necessary details to be served in real time, as and when the user demands them. This makes the delivery of the image highly efficient.

We do not crop or resize images in any way once they are uploaded; the resolution, framing and aspect ratio are determined by the user prior to uploading. This also means that, unlike some other images that are presented online with zooming functionality built into them, a SmartFrame will never be displayed beyond its full resolution as the user zooms into it, which means there is no pixelation or degradation of any sort. Quality is preserved at all times.

The revenue is split three-ways after running costs – how does that split work? Will running costs increase as the amount of high-quality images grows?

Once the direct cost of running an ad campaign has been deducted from the net CPM, we offer publishers either a percentage of revenues or a guaranteed minimum CPM. We then split the remaining revenue with the content owner. This helps build a more transparent media and image ecosystem and re-establish much-needed fairness within the industry.  As regards running costs, these are directly attributable to the serving of ads and the SmartFrames on which they appear, and they should actually fall over time as our network grows.

How can publishers be sure that the technology powering these high-quality images is failproof, especially if it is one central server that stores them?

The SmartFrame ecosystem is based on an AWS cloud, with multiple levels of resiliency in place and fully automatic scaling in case of traffic and activity spikes. Most assets used to serve SmartFrame are cached and served through a global content delivery network (CDN).

SmartFrame’s infrastructure is monitored at all times and supported with enterprise-level service level agreements (SLA). The system is guaranteed to be operational at least 99% of the time and across 2022 this was recorded at 99.9%. Users can also check the system status at any time.

As with any established industry, the media and advertising sphere works – but it has its flaws. The lack of compensation for image creators – who are the ones who primarily suffer the financial consequences – has had a ripple effect across the media industry. Inadequate image protection can lead to the dissemination of fake and tampered information, an issue image streaming can mitigate against.

Beyond this, however, image streaming can also increase general transparency within the industry, providing traceability from image to publisher and beyond. Transforming the image industry is no easy feat, but with benefits to user experience, seamless workflows and reliability, it could be the change that is needed.