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Online publishers have been doing a lot of soul-searching lately about how to give their advertising revenue a shot of adrenaline without upsetting their readers. Native advertising, in which stories commissioned by sponsors are dressed up to resemble editorial material, is one of the most widely discussed efforts by publishers (including efforts at The New York Times).

A new technology starting to catch the attention of publishers, especially outside the United States, could further feed the debate over native advertising by turning any visual element on a web page, including editorial photographs and videos, into advertisements.

The technology from a Finnish start-up called Kiosked works like this: publishers who want to earn revenue from photographs and videos on their sites place a snippet of code from Kiosked on their pages. When a reader visits the page, Kiosked does a split-second scan of the written material that accompanies a photo on the page — perhaps a news story or a product review. It then presents a selection of one or more relevant products or services the reader can buy online, overlaying the items on a strip that hovers above the photo.

Kiosked says the publishers using its technology, which it released last fall, include The Telegraph, the British newspaper; IDG, the publisher of technology magazines and Web sites; and a variety of fashion, technology and sports publications in Europe, including Rugby Week and T3.

In a telephone interview, Micke Paqvalén, the founder and chief executive of Kiosked, said the company’s technology “engages consumers in content” rather than acting like pushy, intrusive advertisements.

“We want to be viewed as a service, not as an advertisement,” Mr. Paqvalén said. “We are always looking at it from a consumer point of view, and consumers are extremely conscious. They will respond if it becomes overcommercialized.”

The big question with native advertising is whether readers realize they are seeing an advertisement to begin with (publishers like The Times give readers various visual cues to denote sponsored content). With Kiosked, advertisements and editorial content are not merely adjacent — one rests on top of the other. And the ads are harnessing images, the most visually arresting element of a Web page, where ads have not typically intruded before (other advertising technologies let people provide hyperlinks to products from words in articles).

The advertisements on photos seem less jarring in some instances than others. On device review sites and fashion magazines, the line between editorial and advertising photographs has long been a little fuzzy. Readers are there, after all, for articles that help them figure out what to buy.

On a a review on PC Advisor of the Xbox One, for instance, Kiosked’s shopping widget pops up over a photograph of the game console, with links to buy Call of Duty and other games from an online retailer, Base.com.

An article on animal print clothing on a Dutch fashion Web site, Fashionista, has links to related merchandise that appear over a picture of a model with a rooster T-shirt.

Other examples feel a bit more intrusive. An image on a Rugby Week story about a recent British match, for example, has links to buy jerseys, leggings and other sports equipment. A photo of James Cracknell, an Olympic rower and endurance athlete, that ran with a question-and-answer column in The Telegraph is festooned with links to buy hiking boots, a Nike FuelBand and sunscreen.

Publishers that use Kiosked can decide what types of visual content will and won’t have the shopping links, banishing them from photographs of, say, suffering in Syria and other images where the tone is especially incompatible with commerce.

Publishers get access to a battery of analytical tools so they can see which images get people shopping the most. And since they collect revenue from successful purchases, it is easy to see how tempting it will be for publishers to make editorial decisions about photographs based on such considerations.

To Mr. Paqvalén, publishers should be able to get a piece of the action since their editorial material is, in many cases, already helping people make purchases on web stores.

“In the world we’re in today, the publisher is creating impulses, and e-commerce merchants are capturing the value of these impulses,” he said. With Kiosked, he said, publishers themselves “become the web shops of the future.”