Pixazza went live yesterday, thanks to backing by Google, and a number of other investors.

Using a novel crowdsourcing approach, Pixazza employs “experts” across the internet to identify products in publisher’s photos and linking those to merchants paying to have their brands identified in the images.

According to the article in Cnet, advertisers such as Zappos, Bluefly, Eluxury.com, Shopbot.com, Overstock.com, and Macy’s have been involved in a test with Pixazza since last fall, and now have almost 2 MM assets across a variety of publishers sites.

Beyond the crowdsourcing element, however, there are a couple of parts of this idea that are interesting, namely the increasingly blurred line between advertising and editorial matter, and the time-sensitive nature of the imagery creating a conflict between fresh content and fully monetizing each image.

Regarding the blurred advertising/editorial line, there’s a clear question about who will be making the editorial calls in the future for the sites carrying such advertising opportunities. When the photo is the centerpiece for an article, and the photo must incorporate paid sponsors’ products and be tagged in advance to capture maximum revenue while its still fresh, the scales have to tip more toward the advertising department to dictate what stories are “worth” running.

And in regard to the fresh content issue, publishers may be prone to keeping a story front-and-center longer than normal to maximize revenue from the images within it, at the sake of long-term site visitor erosion due to the content becoming stale.

Certainly an interesting concept, and one that bears watching. However, I think the ultimate success of this model will be to push the sponsor ID process and tagging upstream into the original photo shoot, and add this as part of an “enhanced buy” to either an adwords or display campaign.

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.