PROBLEMS WITH PHOTO MONETIZATION

For example, your Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr account may have a ton of pictures showing you, your friends or your family doing some form of exercise. Now it may not matter to you what brand of sneakers they are wearing, but it is important to advertisers. An advanced computer vision technology system could detect whether they are sweating in Nikes, Reeboks, or Adidas!

Similarly, if you go to your friend’s house for a party and the next day the pictures are uploaded onto a social media website, the advanced computer vision technology would be able to detect what brand beer you drank or from which company the pizza was from.

A further, facial recognition technology could help detect emotions based on happy, sad or other expressions. It will be a small leap to measuring visual brand sentiment by extracting moods and feelings about products from photos.

PROBLEMS WITH PHOTO MONETIZATION

Will customers be able to welcome their personal photos being used as advertising? Some may have privacy concerns, while others might embrace the opportunity, after being motivated by rewards in brand loyalty programs or even through revenue sharing.

Before the News Feed makeover, Facebook got a lot of attention over its Graph Search feature which was a solution for more niche targeting of Facebook's more than one billion users. Graph Search will let you connect with other people based on very detailed criterion, such as “People Who Live in India, Who Like Jay Z and chocolate cookies.” It delves into a huge pool of data, but also has restrictions for identifying what is in the photos. Like all of Facebook ads and promoted posts, Graph Search also depends on text. So, if a photo is not tagged with the product or person you are looking for, it won’t come up in the search.

Following its huge change to visual content, Facebook has also announced that it will soon be showing 15 second video ads that will automatically start playing in your News Feed. A decision still has to be made on this, as most feel that they are even more interfering than silent photos.

While visual content continues to increase, social networks are still struggling to monetize it. There is a huge opportunity for using advanced image technology to their present advertising services because now no brand needs to remain “invisible” any longer.