If you’re a publisher using images in your site or blog, and you’re willing to sacrifice a little real estate inside your images, you could be poised to make a nice little chunk of change from Pixazza.
The site, which launches today and hopes to be the AdSense for images, uses crowdsourcing to match products in photos on participating sites with similar products available for purchase, and essentially turns bloggers and content creators into affiliate marketers who can cash in on Pixazza’s merchant network.
Publishers just need to create an account, login to the site, and embed the JavaScript code in the header section of their website. Then, by default, images — even from previously published content — are added to Pixazza’s shoppers’ queue, and once each image has been analyzed, a mouse over call to action will appear over each image.
Since products within photos — namely fashion-related items to begin with — are matched by real people to similar products available for purchase through Pixazza’s merchant network, site visitors can mouse over images to click to buy items they like, and you, the site publisher, get a piece of the action.
Merchants in Pixazza’s shopper catalogue include power-packed retail operations like Zappos, Amazon, BlueFly, Pacsun, Torrid, and Rampage. And if you’re looking to earn a little extra dough, you can sign up to be one their human-powered product matching investigators. The money you make from Pixazza, however, directly correlates to transactions that occur as a result of the products you identified, so it’s 100% commission base.
The immediate use case for Pixazza includes celebrity and gossip-oriented blogs who are constantly posting photos of famous starlets and Hollywood hunks. We can easily envision photos with Pixazza price tags appearing on sites like PerezHilton, as Perez readers are probably pretty interested in purchasing look-a-like celebrity items that have been analyzed and tagged by real humans, not robots.
As James Everingham, Pixazza’s CTO, states, “No computer algorithm can identify a black pair of Jimmy Choo boots from the 2009 fall collection in the same way a person can. Rather than rely on image analysis algorithms, our platform enlists product experts to drive the process.”
The only downside we see to Pixazza is the obvious missing piece to the photo, product, profit formula — the photographer. Where’s his/her cut in the action? Maybe we’re over-thinking the matter, but it seems a little sketchy that a publisher can start to instantly profit off their existing photos when the original content creator of the money-making photo is left out of the equation.
The site does, however, have some heavy-hitters putting their pockets behind the photo-for-profit venture. Pixazza’s managed to raise $5.75 million in Series A funding from none other than Google, along with venture firms August Capital, CMEA Capital, and a number of individual investors. Regardless of Google’s backing, Pixazza will need to demonstrate an immediate value with image viewers, and its success hinges on whether or not we, the online consumers, want to click to buy via photos.
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