Pixazza reaches 70M unique users per month

The photo tagging service also increases the publishers in its network 15x

Pixazza, the innovative advertising company that uses images already on the Web to bring attention to brands, on Tuesday announced that it now reaches more than 70 million unique visitors each month, representing an increase of 80% in the last five months. 

Hailed as an "AdSense for images," Pixazza takes an original approach to user engagement. While dynamic display ads, banner ads, and those God awful roll-over text ads try to trick the user into looking at the ad, Pixazza uses images that the user is already engaged with to deliver ads for brands. So essentially, a Web user might be browsing through their favorite celebrity gossip site (what's Charlie Sheen up to these days?...) when they see a picture that catches their eye. They roll over the image or click on it and a little text box appears to provide information on the items in the picture (the fedora that Charlie Sheen rocks in his latest webcast?), which the user can purchase right there on the spot. The company's network of images now receive some 20 billion page views each year, representing a 100% increase in the last five months.

For every click that a user makes on a Pixazza-tagged image, the merchant pays Pixazza, with a cut for the publisher. And it looks like publishers are happy with the business model: Pixazza also announced Tuesday that the number of publishers in the network has grown 15x in the last five months. 

“Consumers access an unprecedented level of content through the Internet, auniquely visual medium, but brand advertisers have lacked the tools to attracta viewer’s attention within the context of images,” said Pixazza CEO Bob Lisbonne in a prepared statement. “Pixazza solves this problem by transforming online images intocaptivating content that connects consumers with products when their intent,interest and engagement are at its highest.”

Founded in 2008, the company has raised $17.8 million to date (the most recent of which was a $12 million round in July) from Google Ventures, CMEA Capital, Shasta Ventures, Ron Conway, Gideon Yu, August Capital, and more. 

Image source: Pixazza.com