Dear PicApp publisher,

I am happy to share some great news today. But first some background:
as most of you remember, PicApp started as a destination platform where long tail publishers can license top stock photos for Free. We were very excited to serve thousands of publishers with the world’s best content and to partner with the most amazing blogging platforms. Unfortunately this model hasn’t proven to be viable, and so we had pivoted to leverage the immense know-how we had about how people interact with images online. And so the PicApp widget was born, with the intention to stream more related images around each photo online, based on its context. The vision though was much larger.

Fast forward a year later, the PicAapp widget is on a solid track to fulfill its mission to become the ultimate rich media layer that automatically transforms images into an interactive layer, which enhances every publisher’s site. You can check out the PicApp widget enabled on top sites such as Answers.com, BlogHer, and many others. We continuously add value to the widget and look at how users best engage with it. Platform brings into play related videos, searches, trends, sharing options and various shopping apps, with an obvious focus on related quality images as well. As part of the progress, we had partnered with leading platforms to help us and our publishers monetize the newly created inventory. One of these partners was Ybrant Digital, one of the largest digital advertising groups in the market.

Today we are happy to announce that the partnership with Ybrant Digital is taking one step further, and the PicApp team will be joining the Ybrant group of companies. PicApp will continue to operate as an independent unit within Ybrant, but this will of course further open us the door to their realm of advertisers, many (many!) publishers and most important - a very smart and welcoming team that has the most ‘family-like’ culture I have ever seen in a company. Joining Ybrant will enable PicApp to accelerate its growth among publishers and bring immense value to our existing community of publishers. Among its enormous international reach and experience in monetizing digital content, Ybrant has also become the new home to much known properties such as Lycos and Tripod. We are convinced that Ybrant is the best partner to help us with fulfilling our destiny, and are proud to be part of its group of companies.
PicApp will enjoy additional resources under Ybrant umbrella to further develop the product and add more value to many publishers. If you are a PicApp publisher you will be hearing from us soon, and should expect great things to happen on the product and monetization options we will present.

Check out the picapp Blog and follow us @picapp for more updates.

Eyal Gura
PicApp CEO and Co-Founder
You can also find me @eyalg
 

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First, you need to subscribe to the service you want.

• Subscribe to Amazon’s Associates service in this link, press Join now for Free
• Subscribe to ShopStyle’s service here and press Sign Up

After you’ve received your user ID numbers go to our site -

• Login to your account
• Go to the Revenue Tags tab
• Enter your ID or user number.

That’s all you need to do and you can start making money from these applications in our lightboxes. We continue our efforts to supply you with many applications to suit your needs and further our offering.

Have a great week y’all,
Ira

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Things are moving fast, the Picapp team is working day and night like mad! And we got results for ya!

If just a few days ago we upgraded our lightboxes so they can hold your own content, now we add a few really cool and popular Apps to our already app packed lightbox.

We’ve added related ShopSense products and their easy to use platform to buy related items -

Also, one of the biggest addition to the apps arsenal is related videos right from the lightbox itself without leaving your site

So, a lot is going on and we should have a few more of these developments coming your way so keep tabs with what Picapp is up to!

Have a great week everybody,

Ira

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So, one of the most requested demands from you guys is to be able to put your own images inside the lightbox. We’ve just done that and much more.

From now on you’ll have a choice of content sources to choose from. You can use Picapp’s content or insert your own Flickr photo set (once you make it public)*, search Flickr’s public images or search for Yahoo and WikiMedia images. This choice is done from our newly designed Publisher’s Control Panel from inside each lightbox. All the images are from the public domain. Here’s a screenshot of the new panel with the content choices -

It’s very easy to make the changes and it takes seconds to take effect. In order to choose a new content source, just pick on from the drop down list. The preview images on the right will update automatically according to the new source. Click Save in order to save changes. Of course, you can easily change the search term as was before in the search term bar.

* To use your own images you must make a Flickr photo set and make it public so we can access it. When you choose Your Flickr Set option you will be asked to enter the ID number of the set in order to use it. Click Save to save changes. We do not save your images, only bring the in for the lightbox.

There you go, another addition to the Picapp lightbox aimed at you guys from your own wish list.

Have a great week y’all!

Ira

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I’m glad to announce that from now on, seeing the widget start its work, changes made to our widgets, changes in the lightbox and any other setting changes will take just a few seconds, as opposed to the 90 minutes it might have taken before.

Our development team has worked hard on this, as we deemed this change the most significant one we can do to benefit everyone using our lightbox widgets. This will make changes on the fly much more common working with the widget a piece of cake.

Installing the widget will immediately change your site and you can enjoy our engaging lightboxes and apps. In our new Publisher’s Control Panel inside the lightboxes, you can change the term used to search our database and immediately see the changes.

So let’s change things just for fun, to try it out. Let’s change all images in the lightboxes to Paris Hilton. Common, let’s just try, It’ll be fun I promise! Ira

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as you all know , we made a decision to transition out of being a provider of imagery content for blogs and to focus on our image monetization tools.

When we shut down the service we got many emails from loyal users who were asking for alternatives and some of them even suggested to pay for it.

As we were very emotionally attached to this great service as well , we went ahead and sent a survey to ask our community about its willingness to pay for editorial photos.

The results were mixed and for the most part indicated willingness to pay mainly in the $5-10/m range  and extremely low interest to pay anything over $50/m  - all of these are many miles away from what the editorial content partners ( that have much cost of producing such content) were willing to consider.

We therefore sadly decided to keep the image search service closed.   :(

As mentioned in our earlier blog post , you can find to some extent alternatives for your editorial needs with these providers:  Zuma, Newscom, Fotoglif, Reuters, Gettyimages, Shutterstock

For those of you who participated in the survey - Thank you so much for taking an active part in our community and we hope to stay in touch.

The PicApp Team

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First, thank you very very much for your participation in the survey we sent out regarding bringing back Picapp image search. There was a high degree of participation and commenting varied responses. We really appreciate your time and efforts and understand the importance of this issue.

While we are still analyzing the inbound responses, we can already approach some of the content partners and see if they will be willing to offer this type of limited-subscription type of packages. As the price level most of you indicated is very low, it’s going to be a challenge but we are going to give it a shot.

Please keep following our blog for updates. Again, thank you very much that you have taken the time to respond, be involved and make an impact. You are what we work for and we will continue to work to bring you the best that we can offer.

Have a great week!

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I wanted to elaborate more about the abilities of the Publisher’s Control Panel inside our new lightboxes. This application was sought after by many publishers who wanted to further control the content of each lightbox. The application is accessed only by registered users.

First, to approach the control panel you need to be logged in to our website and then, in the same browser window, open a new tab with the image you would like to edit. You will see the Control Panel button at the bottom of the lightbox on the right end of the applications bar -

After pressing it you will be presented with the follwing screen -

From this screen you can decide on the term that will be used to search images within our database. Put in your wanted term in the text bar at the top of the lightbox. You will see preview thumbnails of the images that will be shown under and to the right of the text bar. When you find the one you want, press enter. Allow the system upto 90 minutes to reset itself. During this time you will continue to see the older term so don’t be alarmed. We are working on cutting down this wait time.

The second setting you can change is whether the widget will show our related images or show a blown version of the original image. If you don’t approve the related images that the search brought up for this specific lightbox, check this choice and choose the Page option. If you want the entire website to show just one blown image, choose the Site option.

I hope this post clarifies the way to use this application. If you have any other questions you can read the related support page here.

And on a personal note, I’ll try and put up some music recommendations at the end of my posts. Expect it to be mostly rock, nothing fancy here here’s the first one for you, it’s a band called Infectious Grooves, wacky funky rock song called Punk It Up.

Enjoy!!!!

Ira

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My name’s Ira, a part of the Picapp team, a rock drummer, an amateur car racer and an avid D&D player. Great to meet y’all!

I’d like to introduce you to a new, closed beta, related images widget we just released. Have a look at how it adds to this dreay post and my incoherent mumblings -

All you have to do is decide on the grid size you want and the search term you wish to show and that’s it. You’ve got your Thumbnails done, courtesy of Picapp’s extensive image database from the best content partners in the world - Getty, Reuters, Corbis and many more. The thumbnails have the play button and the lightbox photo gallery just like our bigger widget showing more images and accessing our new apps.

The idea for this widget came about from requests by many publishers who wanted to join the Picapp community and didn’t have images on their sites. This way they can automatically add images to textual pages. It can be added on a single basis to a specific post or added to site template to be populated across all content pages as explained here.

The thumbnail gallery can also be organized in a grid and put in your page’s sidebar where it awaits to hook readers to your site for much longer. Have a look on the right hand corner of this page for instance. It keeps updating whenever we have new images so that you don’t have worry about updating your posts.

Don’t forget to check out all the features of our newly structured lightbox, you know what to do, just click on the images above to see the ladies get their (thumb)nails done!

Happy new year, have a good one!!!

Ira

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It has been only few days since we happily announced our new apps platform - to enrich your lightboxes with many engagement boosting apps.  Today we are glad to inform that we deployed the Publisher Application Dashboard , available under Apps in our home page and inside the Publisher main Dashboard.

Our logged-In publishers , can now add and remove the initial group of apps the picapp dev team has created for you  - let us know what you think ! and stay tuned form more cool apps!

One important (default) App that worth to mention is the publisher’s Control Panel. This app is visible only to the publisher (!!) and enables  much more control on the way the Lightbox behaves and its look&feel.   You can read detailed instructions here ;

Thank you all for providing us with passionate feedback that made this all possible!

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