But it’s important to note that there are other benefits to owning your own photo-sharing service. For instance, Twitter could use its new service to run ads, just like many other photo-sharing services.

Here’s a nice reminder of how that works: A photo of Sunday’s barely-attended Brewers-Marlins game, posted by Sara Livingston, then retweeted yesterday afternoon by MSNBC’s Darren Rovell. It has since been viewed more than 27,000 times.

Right now those views are generating dollars for Twitpic, which is running two ad units on the page, sold by middlemen like Google, Federated Media and VideoEgg. But there’s no reason Twitter couldn’t be running its own ads against that photo and keeping all of the revenue for itself.

Twitter ads on Twitter photos won’t be a magic revenue bullet for the company. And Twitter hasn’t said anything publicly about its ad plans for the service, anyway–my hunch is that if they do runs ads there, they’ll wait a while to do so. (Note that Facebook is only adding a light dusting of ads next to photos its users share, and Facebook is the Web’s biggest photo-sharing service).

Photo ads would be a nice option for Twitter’s sales team, though. Particularly because they don’t require the company to create an entirely new kind of advertising, like they’re trying to do with their “Promoted” suite of products.

Ad buyers are still trying to get their heads around ads like “Promoted Tweets” because they’re not sure what value they’re getting for their money, what kind of users are seeing them, and whether they can buy enough volume to make the thing worthwhile.

But ads on Web pages, next to photos people like to look at? That’s an easy sell. Doesn’t easy sound nice, Adam Bain?

SAY is now built out of the unlikely combination of an ad network (VideoEgg), a blogging platform (Six Apart)–the two merged last year–and a social network for pets and their owners (Dogster).

What makes things even more odd is the company described the justification for the purchase as part of its “evolution to become the home of independent media as it continues to acquire and build media properties with a strong point of view, passionate editors, and active communities.”

Dogster was founded in 2004, raised $1 million in 2006, and described itself as profitable starting in 2008.

End of an era.

That would be that ads will start to be put into YouTube videos rather than nearby on the site. Called InVideo ads, they will be semi-see-through “overlays” that will go over part of professionally made content (and in some user-generated videos).

There will, of course, be ad-revenue sharing with partners, although it is not clear if enough professional content is on YouTube yet to make a giant business.

It is not a particularly innovative move on the part of Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last year and also bought a lot of copyright-infringement trouble, too. Several other online video companies like VideoEgg have been trying out similar solutions recently.

But Google’s move will obviously have reverberations, as YouTube is the most popular online video destination, with users who spend a lot of time on the site. Google is already dominant in the online search-ad market and can easily move markets to change past practices in new arenas.

That might include killing off the horrid reliance on prerolls, 15-second ads that precede a video that most consumers despise.

And, for that alone, we salute Google, VideoEgg and anyone else who can come up with different video ad solutions that work. Until then, the explosion of online video–which is the really key trend on the Web now–could become the most popular application and also the biggest money pit.

Now that the video ads are rolling, I am sure the same content providers YouTube is trying to make ad revenues with might look forward to that supposed “fingerprinting” technology designed to thwart copyright infringement on sites like, well, YouTube.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).