Snap launches Snap Shares advertising platform

Snap is launching a new advertising platform today based on the company's popular Snap Shot service. Blogs and other websites using Snap Shots have a little icon next to all outgoing links on the page. Hover your mouse over the icon and you can see a preview of the destination page or media from sites like YouTube an Flickr. In other words, Snap Shots help you decide whether a link is worth clicking on.

Now Snap is launching Snap Shares a platform that will allow bloggers to monetize their sites. Basically when you hover over a Snap Shot icon, you'll see the same image preview as before, but also some advertising at the bottom of the window.

In some ways, this is similar to the annoying pop-up advertisements you see from services like IntelliTXT. The difference is Snap Shots windows only pop up for links that a web publisher has intentionally put on the site. And Snap Shots windows show actual, useful content and not just advertising.

Snap matches ads with content by using machines and people to classify websites. Advertisers can also choose to publish ads on specific ad types like MovieShot, ProfileShot, and MapShot.

The service goes live today.

Tags: advertising, snap, snap-shares, snap-shot