Cooliris aims to boost pageviews for publishers of its 3D wall

Cooliris, a much-watched maker of tools for browsing images and videos on websites, has been promoting its Cooliris Wall as a way for publishers to add lots of good-looking, engaging content. Through the Wall, they can present images, videos, and more in a format that visitors can scroll through quickly and smoothly. While the time users spend on such features can be presented to advertisers through a metric called “engagement,” for many Web publishers the real measure of audience is pageviews. Now Cooliris can improve those too.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company said it has worked with research company ComScore to develop a new way of measuring how people use Cooliris. In the past, if you visited, say, the website of musician Taylor Swift and looked at different photos in the Cooliris-powered gallery, that would still count as one pageview to comScore. Now, when you click on each piece of content, that counts as a separate pageview. And with Cooliris saying it increases engagement — a measure of time actively spent on a website — for publishers by five or six times, those pageviews should add up.

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The company is also giving publishers more data about their Cooliris Walls by integrating them with Google’s data tool Google Analytics.

As those features make Cooliris more useful for publishers, the company also wants consumers to use the Cooliris Wall as a way to share media on their personal websites or social networks, using an application called Cooliris Express. That product is also being updated today with the ability to create a single gallery in Cooliris, then share it across all your social networks.

Cooliris says Express has already been used to create more than 40,000 walls since it launched last fall. This spring, usage has been growing, with about 400 new walls created every day.

So how does all this help Cooliris make money? It doesn’t, necessarily. The company has pulled back from an effort to run advertising on the walls of its publishing partners, said Executive Vice President of Products Michele Turner, so most of its revenue right now comes from ads in a separate product, a plug-in that users install on their browser.

But adding more publisher tools seems like a natural prelude to exploring new revenue opportunities through the Cooliris Wall. In the meantime, Turner said it’s a good way to get the company’s name out there, and to convince more users to install the plug-in.

Cooliris has raised $18 million, mainly from well-known venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.