FuelMyBlog to launch revenue sharing stock photo repository for bloggers?

I got an email from FuelMyBlog this morning offering me the chance to win one of 2 iPod Nano’s or some Amazon gift vouchers simply by filling out a survey.

The survey itself was simple enough. The first couple of questions were about how you use images in your blog and what sources you use to acquire the.

Then I hit question number 11 and things started to fall into place as the paragraph before the text read:

Please consider an internet-based service which provides you a choice of professional graphics and photographs which have been chosen based on the text of your post. These photographs and graphics include pictures of current events (such as celebrities, news, sports, etc.) and other general topics (such as nature, lifestyle, travel, etc.). Although these types of photographs usually cost hundreds of dollars to use legally, this service will provide them at no cost to you! To help pay for the legal rights to use the images, the service will place a non-intrusive targeted ad next to or within the image.

The 2 questions which came after this paragraph were related to how likely you would be to use, and what percentage of posts you would use a revenue sharing service which delivered photos to your blog via various methods.

Those methods being your blog platform, widget / toolbar and external sites.

The questions were also heavily concerned with the issue of appropriate usage rights for images and how that would effect your usage.

Current Event and Non-Current Event (library) Photos, with confirmed appropriate usage rights, delivered via an external website with 75% revenue share.

You can check out the survey for yourself here and be in with a chance to win the prizes before as long as you complete it before the 18th of July.

Current Event photos can be quite hard to obtain legally and can often cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get the rights to use so it will be interesting to see how a company would approach not only obtaining and licensing these images but making them available to bloggers for use. 

While the idea is very intriguing I can’t help but speculate on how you would actually make money from it in order to share revenue with bloggers.’

About the only viable way I can think of would be to have the images embedded via a script in to your pst which throws up an advert when you mouse over it. Much like those annoying SNAP preview links many bloggers are so in love with.

That kind of an approach would guarantee that I don’t use the service.

Overlaying an advertisement on top of the image wouldn’t be a good solution either as invariably there will be some images where the actual content you want to see is obscured by the advert.

Using the image plain hyperlink back to the stock libraries page would also be ineffective as it probably wouldn’t result in a high enough click through rate to make it worth while. 

I suppose they could take an approach where if you normally might have say a 200×200 pixels space effort an image but now you have a 200×220 and the last 200×20 pixels are used for displaying a clickable advertisement / link.

That might be more acceptable to me as you get the best of both worlds.

Anyway, this is all speculation. I have no inside line here on what Kevin may or may not be up to. It will be interesting to keep an eye on though..

What do you guys think. Would you use images from a stock library on in your blog posts if they included advertising?

(Image by Aapja)