Pixazza Alternative¶

Pixazza, often called "AdSense for images", made the products in publishers' photos shoppable. Publishers added a line of JavaScript, crowdsourced workers tagged the products in each image with a link to a retailer, and Pixazza shared the commission on every purchase with the publisher. Pixazza became Luminate in 2011, and Yahoo acquired and shut down Luminate in 2014. Mentionlink works the same way for publishers, with the same commission-sharing model, but uses AI instead of human taggers, and links the products your articles mention as well as the ones your photos show.

Category	Pixazza	Mentionlink
Status	Renamed Luminate in 2011, shut down in 2014	Available today, for any website or WordPress
Product recognition	Crowdsourced workers tagging each image by hand	AI vision, when the page loads
Time to monetize a new photo	However long it took a tagger to get to it	As soon as readers view it
What gets monetized	Images	Images and text
Where the click goes	One retailer per tag	The store in the reader's own country, in a new tab, while your page stays open
Integration	One line of JavaScript	One line of JavaScript, or the WordPress plugin
Revenue Model	Revenue-sharing on commissions	Revenue-sharing on commissions

From Crowdsourcing to AI¶

Tagging by hand doesn't scale with the news cycle. Every new photo had to wait in a queue for a person to identify what was in it and find a matching product, and a photo that went viral before it was tagged earned nothing.

Mentionlink identifies the products in a photo as soon as readers start viewing it. An AI visioning agent captions the photo using the article around it as context, finds the products in it, and matches each one to a listing, so a photo published a minute ago is as shoppable as one published a year ago. See the Tech Spec for how captions and hotspots are added to the page.

Beyond the Image¶

Pixazza only looked at images. Most product recommendations are in the text: the blender named in a recipe, the jacket in a travel story, the headphones in a review roundup. Mentionlink finds those mentions in your text and turns them into affiliate links, and connects them to the photo: hovering over a product in the article highlights the same product's hotspot in the image.

Where Higher RPM Comes From¶

Revenue per 1,000 pageviews (RPM) from affiliate links breaks down into five numbers:

RPM = 1,000 × clickthrough rate × conversion rate × average order value × commission rate

Mentionlink is built to push every one of them up. Plug your own numbers into the Affiliate Revenue Calculator to see what that's worth on your traffic.

Clickthrough: Every Photo, Every Mention¶

With no tagging queue, every eligible photo is checked for products, and every high-intent mention in the text can get a link. Mentionlink uses AI to link only high-intent mentions, so readers see a handful of links that are worth clicking rather than a wall of them.

Conversion: The Right Store for Every Reader¶

A tag picked by hand points every reader to the same retailer. Mentionlink picks the link for each reader instead: it sends them to the store in their own country and takes into account that prices vary, with more than 40,000 ZIP codes in the US alone. A reader who lands on the item they wanted, in a store that ships to them, at the price they'll see at checkout, is a reader who buys.

Order Value and Commission: Earn on the Whole Basket¶

Mentionlink matches each product to the affiliate program with the best fit, such as Amazon Associates, Fanatics or Lids. Programs like Amazon Associates pay on the qualifying purchases the reader makes after the click, not only on the product that was linked, so one photo can earn on a whole shopping basket.

Stacking: Add Revenue Without Taking Any Away¶

Mentionlink adds no ad slot, so it doesn't compete with your display ads for space or attention. It only links text that is not already linked, and it never interferes with Skimlinks, VigLink or other link converters. Every dollar it earns is added on top of what your page already makes.

A Better Reading Experience¶

Captions that help. Each photo gets a caption that names what's in it, inside a <figure> that works with your existing markup.
Works on phones. Hotspot labels sit on the photo, with no hover required, and adapt to the size of the image.
Fast. The script is about 35 KB compressed, loads with defer, and waits for the page to finish loading. See Performance.
Accessible. Links, hotspots and product cards conform to WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
No cookies. Mentionlink sends no cookies, so it doesn't need to be in your cookie consent banner.
Disclosed for you. A footer on every page discloses that it may contain affiliate links.

Brand-Safe Without a Human in the Loop¶

Before Mentionlink captions a photo or links a product seen in it, an image safety classifier reviews it. Photos of political, religious, assistive tech, or violent subjects are left exactly as you published them: no caption, no hotspots, and no links.

You stay in control:

Links per page: cap how many affiliate links Mentionlink adds to a page.
Sections: enable Mentionlink only on the sections where it fits, by URL pattern. See Configuration and Customization.
Individual links: refine, remove, or add links one by one.
Search engines: every link carries rel="sponsored nofollow", so it has no impact on SEO.

Try It on Your Own Photos¶

Start a pilot on a few sections of your site, rolled out by URL pattern.
Compare affiliate RPM on the pilot sections against similar sections without Mentionlink.
Widen the rollout section by section once you're happy with the results.

Mentionlink is a revenue share with no upfront cost and no locked-in contract, and our team handles the installation for free. Email us at hello@mentionlink.com to set up a pilot.

Get Started

Schedule a free demo or email us at hello@mentionlink.com