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I built what I believe to be the most sane way to "advertise" something: Let people buy directly from an image. This solves the problem of people not interested in the content, because of its unobtrusive nature -- if they don't hover over an item within the image, it's as if the "advertisement" isn't there.

Check out my demo (desktop only) at http://www.worldlifestyle.com/testpost

My website which you can sign up for the (free) beta at: http://pleenq.com

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Oops guys! It looks like the publisher temporarily removed the PLEENQ script tag from that page. Go to https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/10/28/thehangover... for a better example. This is actually a real client's page, and shows how some websites use PLEENQ.

Neat.

One suggestion: intuitively I felt like I needed to click on the popovers instead of on the underlying image. Permitting the user to move the mouse over the popover and click that as well might increase effectiveness for those who haven't seen this before.

Great idea! I've been incorporating different styles of UI features that the website owner can enable/disable at will, so I'll add this one to them.

Given the approx. 90M people complaining about your original link, can you not edit your OP?

Btw, it looks pretty cool.

It doesn't allow me to edit my original post, unfortunately. I guess too much time has passed since I posted it.

You can only edit for ~2 hours after you post.

That's pretty cool. How do you detect product edges?

They're manually created by the website owner.

I clicked your link and wanted to hate what you did, but I have to say I really like it.

Best comment I think I've ever gotten on it, thanks!

After allowing 23 scripts in NoScript, I still don't see anything but a mix of static and animated images. That's not typical in either number of scripts (huge) or brokenness. Attention-grabbing content but execution needs work.

The "How It Works" on second link is well-done where I can see exactly what it's supposed to do. The feature itself is nice.

Please try going to https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/10/28/thehangover... and tell me if that first image shows up with hovers for you.

On that one, I got a Pintrest symbol in upper right corner of the first, two images I tested after allowing a single script with main, site's, domain name in it. Clicking them created a popup asking for login info or something. I'm not a Pintrest user. Was that the intended behavior?

I don't know what I'm looking for in the demo. I turned off adblock and have hovered over the images but I'm not seeing anything. Maybe I have another plugin interfering. I'm using Chrome.

The pleenq website demos the idea well though.

Unfortunately, the publisher disabled the PLEENQ tag on that page (probably because of unknown lot of traffic to a test post!). Here's a better link: https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/10/28/thehangover...

I'm not seeing anything, but I'm on mobile. Does it only work on desktop? That seems like a pretty big deterrent to using it if so.

This is very similar (but far better done) to something I did about 8 years ago for a client while I was working in Australia. The idea was they had a photo of a bedroom and they could draw on top of the image to isolate items in the room that could be purchased.

What I wrote was very very basic, but what you've done is far more impressive and awesome.

Edit: This is something I wouldn't block (from what I currently see) unless it attempted to know everything about me. Damn tracking.

Thanks a lot for that! I think that's one of the core underpinnings -- advertising that brings a benefit, and therefore shouldn't be blocked with an ad-blocker. Hopefully, this is the direction advertising goes towards.

Stunning, I'll admit, but this can't be an easy or lightweight solution to implement, I'd imagine. Kudos either way, there aren't too many things that immediately made me lean toward the screen like that.

Thanks! It's not lightweight -- the average script include I have right now is around 280k. I'm going to be able to reduce it in the next few months to around 150k, I believe. Once downloaded, the processing of it itself is not too intensive.

Thank you for taking a moment to respond; if I can get another question in, can you tell me a bit about how this scales with, say 10 or 40 images on a page as far as filesize goes? 150k in the context of modern web pages is not too far off from being realistic as an ad solution, depending on how many pictures it takes to reach the tipping point of page load time.

I have a test page that does 1000 images with 2-4 PLEENQs on each image, and performance is good with an 8-gig of ram mac mini and an iPhone 5 (my test platform for the mobile version).

I do about 10 million impressions a day, and the request to the server is a pretty consistent ~200ms, along with an async load that won't affect overall page load.

That's not exactly answering the question I was asking, regarding file size.

Oh, I read that as performance on the page for some reason. File size is exactly the same regardless of how many images/PLEENQs.

You consider 280k script lightweight? Wow.

Have you tested this on some cheap, low-end, Chinese phones with the default browser?

> > It's not lightweight -- the average script include I have right now is around 280k.

> You consider 280k script lightweight? Wow.

They do not. :P

Right, I probably misread it. Sorry. The 150k version will be the lightweight.

FWIW I certainly agree that it is an awful lot of JavaScript, even at 150kB. That sort of thing annoys me and I try to block it.

FYI it appears to do nothing on an iPad, since there is no concept of "hovering". Haven't tested on a phone either, which could be a problem with the high tablet/mobile penetration these days.

I have it disabled for all mobile/touch type platforms. The demo will only work on desktop, unfortunately.

I'll be enabling the mobile version(s) of the plugin, once I finish testing them out and creating a way for each website to choose which functionality type it wants to use on its page.

I'll definitely be watching for updates. The best ideas for increasing revenue on websites are usually a marriage of coding and real-world analysis of user intent and actions. This is a great example of that.

External JS dependency? It will be in all adblock databases in no time.

Do this with HTML <map> and CSS :hover inline and it will bypass them; it would also make it work on nearly any browser.

I'm not seeing anything. Hovering over images doesn't work for me on any browser; what should I be trying?

Disable your adblocker.

I'm having the same issue. My add blocker is turned off and I don't see anything when hovering over the images on that blog post.

Can confirm. Does not work on Chrome.

Works fine on chrome/OSX for me. Make sure you went to the right page (hangover things, not the girl doing yoga)

Really, really great idea. This would be an absolutely fantastic addition to something like instagram.

The publisher just disabled the tag on the page. Please go to: https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/10/28/thehangover...

Not bad! Unlike the hundred "link every keyword on a page to a tenuously related product" scripts out there, this actually adds value to the page, highlighting and identifying items in the photo on hover.

I feel kind of stupid but your demo link just shows me a blog about different workouts and it just shows regular images and gifs with no hover effects. Is it supposed to work on chrome?

Edit: same behavior on edge.

Try going to https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/10/28/thehangover... -- the publisher disabled the PLEENQ script tag on the worldlifestyle demo page.

interesting! my friend wanted to do something almost exactly like this but over video. They got a working prototype for it too.

It also looks like a lot of extra work per image to set up all the regions.

It's extra work, but is more contextual. You could, for instance, link to wikipedia articles, imdb articles (for actors) etc. and not just link to ad content.

Really what it does is help define what is inside an image.

Although I despise ads, I have to admit your tech is nice.

Do you do automatic image segmentation, or are these images "hand-labeled" (I can not imagine that would scale)? If it's automatic - is it calculated server-side or client-side?

They're hand-labeled. In the future, I'm sure I'll be hiring a bunch of Google people to build the "automatic" part.

Not a lot of extra work when compared to the amount of work that goes into existing advertising campaigns.

This should be something that will improve over time with machine learning and can already be done right now.

Buggy but very very very awesome.

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