VentureBeat

LiveMarkets launched a service yesterday that lets Web site visitors click on an advertisement and immediately IM chat with a salesperson from the advertiser.

While other startups offer ways of managing the buyer-seller relationship online, LiveMarkets keeps the chat live on the page, right on top of the banner ad, text, or other part of the site. It’s the latest significant innovation in an online advertising market that is booming.

Using LiveMarkets, the advertiser agrees with the publisher about where the chat box will show. The chat service is useful, because it’s much faster than a phone call or an email if a prospective customer wants to talk to a real human before deciding to buy a product .

Below is an example of how it looks (more at bottom).

Advertisers can manage their incoming chats via an administrative interface. People on an advertiser’ sales team can manage more than one chat at a time, with new chats getting directed to the salesperson with the fewest concurrent chats. While LiveMarkets has yet to post the cost of the service, it says it plans to charge advertisers and publishers on a per-chat (CPC) or per-impression (CPM) basis.

Co-founder Justin Kirby brings experience with chat, having worked with Jabber open-source instant messaging technology (which powers Google Talk and other IM services). He originally applied the experience at a previous startup, Qunu, a “mashup of search and instant messaging” for user-generated questions and answers. That site is still live, but Kirby and his cofounders have moved on to do LiveMarkets; they’ve modified the software code from Qunu in the last two and a half months, and have filed a provisional patent on the technology.

The Rocklin, Calif. company of four is self-funded, and launched yesterday at Ad:Tech San Francisco, a major advertising conference. Its frugal nature showed. While the booths of most other companies were glitzy, LiveMarkets couldn’t afford an Internet connection, so they brought their own server; their small banner was strung together with twine; even the room’s carpet didn’t reach their corner, and cardboard boxes were piled behind them. Despite the ignominy of it all, they managed to get approached — by four venture capital firms, six advertising networks, numerous ad agencies, plus two requests for a “white label” version, according to co-founder Baden Gilmore.

The idea seems intuitively useful, there are questions how broadly it will catch on. How often do consumers actually want to talk to a salesperson? It seems most useful for complex purchases, for example to talk with a computer manufacturer, or for help with service (indeed, many sites are already doing such chats from their home pages). However, many forms of online advertising, such as banner ads, have notoriously poor click-through rates. Will people both notice and care about a chat option? Gilmore believes that the one-on-one intelligence and connection will be more effective in closing sales than static banner ads.

One problem: If LiveMarket is a success, it faces the prospect of having its features copied by Google, Yahoo and the other online advertising giants.

The company’s Web site points to a blog post from marketing guru Seth Godin: “Modems are no match for human interaction and trust. Not carefully tracked online ratings, but the sound of a voice, the tone of authority, the receipt of a favor. It matters more than it ever did.”

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[Author Eric Eldon thought he was going to become a professional journalist when he graduated from college two years ago. Instead, he is co-founder of Writewith, a company that makes online word processing work for groups. You can reach him at eric@writewith.com.]

Google will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) a deal to deliver ads to Dish Network, the nation’s second largest satellite TV company, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

This confirms rumors of such a deal we first mentioned at VentureBeat three weeks ago. The deal is significant because it extends Google’s empire to the huge $54 billion television market — and points to a new kind of ad: Since Dish is the nation’s leader in high definition and interactive TV programming, Google will eventually allow advertisers to target specific groups of viewers, based on information about the viewer demographics for each channel.

It follows a pilot test by Google to serve ads to subscribers of Astound Broadband, a cable provider owned by WaveDivision Holdings. From the WSJ:

Under an arrangement to be announced today, Google will sell TV ad spots through an online auction system, with advertisers bidding the amount they are willing to pay per thousand households that view each commercial. Google will send the commercials of the winning bidders to EchoStar, which will then insert them in an unspecified number of daily blocks in the TV programming it delivers to the roughly 13 million households that subscribe to its Dish service.

…Google plans to tell advertisers how many TV set-top boxes were tuned in to each commercial they ran, and charge based only on the number of set-top boxes where the commercial played. It additionally will provide advertisers data about whether users changed the channel during the commercial.

Google is relying on information collected from set-top boxes by operators such as EchoStar, which it says does not permit it to identify any specific subscribers. At least initially, Google is not matching commercials with the content of TV programs or showing ads to specific users based on previous viewing habits or other personal information. The Internet company says concern for user privacy will be a factor in any future efforts to target TV advertising more specifically.

Advertising start-up AdBrite has launched an elegant way to put ads on digital photos, a potentially revolutionary way for photographers to make money.

The feature, called BritePic, was released five days ago, and 144,000 pictures have already been uploaded to AdBrite’s system to claim it, co-founder Philip Kaplan tells VentureBeat.

BritePic uses software to implant ad code directly into digital photos, and provides a host of other nifty tricks that will make the photographer’s trade easier, and more creative. It lets them insert watermarks, add captions, and more. Until now, most photographers have a difficult time tracking where their photos are used — not to mention demanding payment for them when there is so much ripping off going and when much art if for free anyway. This way, photographers get more money the more times it is viewed, even on other sites. For every dollar an advertiser pays for an ad on the photos, AdBrite keeps 30 cents, the photographer gets 70 cents. Adbrite tracks the views, and bills the advertiser accordingly.

Scroll over the photo below to see how the ad pops up.

Judging from the reception so far, people are digging it, said Kaplan, who built the feature. He said 61,000 photos were loaded yesterday to claim the feature. Today, by mid-day 50,000 photos were uploaded. Kaplan has a creative gene — he was founder of Fuckedcompany, a site that chronicled the hardships of the dot-coms after the burst of the Internet bubble.

Until now, the format for embedding images into a web page uses a simple code definer. AdBrite’s BritePic lets you adds more code that you can play around with to customize. Here’s how it works: You register at BritePic, upload a picture, give it tags (so that AdBrite knows what sort of advertising to seek for your photo from its advertising clients), and then answer a few questions. Do you want to add a watermark? Do you want to show the advertising? How big do you want the photo? BritePic generates some code, based on your answers. It then gives you a preview of what the photo looks like. If you want, you can change the code by hand, to resize the photo, change caption, etc. It gives you a visual dashboard (see below), so that this is easy to do.

BritePic code also includes Flash player to show the image with the additional features. Check out the menu in the bottom left of the image above, which includes code needed to embed the photo elsewhere, a zoom to get a closer look at the photo, etc. Techcrunch had an early review of BritePic here.

BritePic doesn’t host image files, so you’ll need to give it a URL where it can pull your photo from. If you’re using photos for a Wordpress blog, you’ll need to tinker with the code slightly (Kaplan says BritePic will be posting such instructions shortly).

What’s remarkable is that this hasn’t been done before. Kaplan said the company worked for seven months on a video feature that is similar to this, which you can also find on the site. However, he then realized the photo version would be more popular. The number of images dwarfs the number of videos on the web.

Kaplan said it is almost like a digital rights management (DRM). Sure, techies can get around the ad code (they can view source code and revert to original html), but they’re unlikely to bother, he said. The feature encourages distribution.