The battle between John McCain and Barack Obama is a war of words. What makes this election different is how far and fast those words can go. The Internet accelerates the reach of the candidates’ messages through online news media, and blogging amplifies the voices of both sides’ supporters. Attributor is tracking how McCain and Obama’s messages move across the Internet and, for the first time, has measured the size of the online audience reading these messages.

This is the first of a series of regular insights Attributor will be sharing on the election between now and November 4^th. Download a .pdf of the full study here.

What we did:

• Used the Attributor platform to capture each candidate’s key issues and speeches as stated on their official web sites: www.johnmccain.com and www.barackobama.com.

• Tracked the distribution of each candidate’s words across 25 Billion+ pages, including blogs and social networks, looking for unique web pages containing matches of their speeches and official position statements.

• Analyzed and categorized the individual sites and pages containing the candidates’ messages.

• Using Attributor’s Audience Finder™ Technology, estimated the reach of each candidate’s messages across the Internet.

Key Findings:

• McCain is holding his own online. The overall audience viewing each candidate’s message was virtually the same with each totaling over 65 Million page views.

• McCain’s campaign messages are more likely to be picked up from his position statements (64%) than his speeches (36%) Obama’s messages are picked up more often through his speeches (71%) than his position statements (29%)

• Despite allegations of media favoritism, McCain’s words are featured 112% more often on news sites than Obama’s. In July there were over 20 Million views of McCain’s messages on news sites.

• Obama is dominating the blogosphere with over 12 Million views of his messages occurring on blogs in July. Twice as many bloggers repeat his messages than those of McCain. Obama owns a similar advantage on social networking sites like Face book and MySpace.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom: The news media is in love with Barack Obama and gives his messages a disproportionate amount of coverage.

Attributor says . . . False

Perhaps this is true when it comes to television or print. But when it comes to coverage of each candidate’s position statements or speeches, McCain is trouncing Obama. His lead on major network web sites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN) is almost 4 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s youthful support translates into higher support across social networks.

Attributor says . . . True

Across social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, Obama’s messages are picked up by more than 2 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s grassroots efforts have resulted in a substantial lead across the blogosphere.

Attributor says . . . True

Obama has an 86% edge in bloggers who incorporate his messages into blog posts. Obama’s Berlin speech fueled a 10% jump in commentary across the Blogosphere.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s message is best delivered through speeches, while McCain’s strength is with his position on issues.

Attributor says . . . True

Obama’s speeches are being picked up on the Web much more than his position statements. The opposite is true for McCain.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online.

Attributor says . . . False - it’s virtually a dead heat.

Our Audience Finder technology shows that Obama’s advantage across the blogs and social media give him a slight advantage over McCain overall. McCain is staying close via his reach on traditional news sites.

In July, Obama’s messages reached slightly over 65 million page views whereas McCain’s estimated page views were just short of 65 million.

Obama’s reach across the blogosphere was more than double than McCain’s in July.

McCain enjoyed an 86% reach advantage on Web sites in July.

Stay tuned for regular insights on the 2008 Election from the Attributor blog.

We’ve stated our philosophy about links vs takedowns, spoken about the link opportunity for top bloggers and quoted famous SEOs.

We’ve done everything but open it up to SEOs . . . until now!

We’re excited to announce a free beta test of Attributor for SEOs looking to build links. Find more information and sign up here. To save a trip to our FAQ, here are some answers.

Is it really free?
Yes, no cost to you. All we want is your feedback.

Why are you opening this up to SEOs?
We believe in the link economy and can’t think of a better group to help us improve our service.

Does Attributor guarantee links?
No and anyone using our service to obtain paid links will be politely asked to leave. What Attributor will do is automate your backlink prospecting and track your success.

Do you only find PR7 and above sites?
We wish. Last month, Attributor identified 25,000 link opportunities with a PR5 or better. With your help, we’ll improve this number and deliver the right link candidates for you.

Is your vision to be a SEO service?
Our customers consist of many large publishers including folks who are using us for Link Building. We will soon be providing services for all types and sizes of publishers, including bloggers.

What are you waiting for? Go get some links.

Louis Gray analyzed his referral traffic trends, saw that blogs were delivering a declining percentage of traffic to his site and came to the conclusion that blog linking is less important than it used to be; instead he argues that social media sites are increasing in importance.

While I agree with the ultimate conclusion that waiting for Scoble or Mashable links is a flawed strategy, Louis’s statement of links being less important is way off-base. Links are an online currency and a key driver of your search engine ranking - a statement backed up by experts such as Debra Mastaler and Jeff Jarvis - and no one can claim that search traffic’s importance.

If Louis is like other top blog sites we’ve analyzed, he’s missing a huge link and traffic opportunity. In the month of June, we loaded the publicly available RSS feeds for several top blog sites into our service to analyze how much re-use was occurring, and more importantly for this discussion, the percentage of re-use that did not link back.

As you can see from the figure below, many of the top blog sites are leaving (link) money on the table.

Louis (and anyone else), let us help you increase your blog link traffic by giving you a web-wide view of your link opportunities and the tools to secure them.

From our early video test results, it’s apparent that video ad relevancy is far from tuned. Hulu may have more monetizable traffic than YouTube, but our analysis indicates the contextual search advertising opportunity around embedded videos is virtually untapped.

Our initial crawling results show that nearly 30% of blog pages contain an embedded video. Over 50% of these pages had ads so we checked to see if the ads were relevant to the video content.

Not so much.

We sampled the embedded videos, and the results were eye-opening and often hilarious. Low-carb diet ads paired with Chevy Chase skits. Anti-wrinkle cream spots next to Paintball safety videos. Kelly Moore paints next to a Miley Cyrus dance-off.

The revenue per video must be abysmal on these examples. Multiply this opportunity by the tens of thousands like these that proliferate across the Web daily.

Perhaps this opportunity will finally bring AdSense and publishers closer together? In exchange for a share of all advertising revenue generated from their content, publishers can provide AdSense and others with an API containing the location of their embedded videos and associated meta data to increase the relevancy of ads. Increase the relevancy, increase the revenue. Expand the pie for everyone.

Online content syndication used to be a simple business. You chased licensing deals with the major U.S. portals, outsourced your reprint business and deflected any unauthorized re-use to your legal team for action. At renewal time, you were either in a ‘data-free zone’ with zero insight on licensee usage or you spent several painful weeks analyzing data that never quite gave you the right answer.

But everything has changed. You need a strategy to participate in the phenomenal growth of social networks and blogs. International growth is exploding - how can you quickly build a licensee lead pipeline? Finally, where can you find a scalable solution to keep track of the bad guys who continuously grab your articles without permission?

But where to start? Here are 8 practical tips to supercharge your content syndication business.

1. Create a content usage feedback loop. Without feedback on the specific articles and genres of content being used by your licensees, you are flying blind. Improve your product and your customers’ satisfaction by reviewing licensee usage in as much detail as you want.
2. Monitor actual usage vs license terms. How many articles do your licensees use every day? Are articles being used on multiple domains? Is usage compliant with the time period restrictions? Our customers tell us that as much as 30% additional revenue is there for the taking.
3. Get your licensees to link. A link back to your site will help your search engine positioning and signal to Google that your article is the original. More info at the Google Webmaster blog.
4. Give users a reason to click back to your site. If your monetization strategy depends on attracting visits back to your site, make sure that the amount of content included in your RSS feed is optimized. If I can read 100% of your content on several different blog sites why would I want to click?
5. Don’t miss the branding opportunity. Many RSS feeds make use of the format’s <image> sub element to enable your logo to be displayed along with your article to achieve greater brand exposure.
6. Watch your search rank. Hundreds of thousands of sites exist for the sole purpose of re-using professionally-produced content to siphon off traffic and ad dollars. Take action to protect your revenue stream.
7. Participate in the long tail. It’s big, and it can be monetized. Your content is appearing all over social networks and blog. Using established licensing platforms like iCopyright and others, you can tap into long tail growth.
8. Implement usage based billing. With web-wide visibility of your content’s usage, you can open up new market segments with a more flexible pricing structure. Instead of all-or-nothing, you can create your own content-vending machine.

Content is still King and it’s an exciting time to be a syndicator. You just need the tools to make sure you are collecting value for every instance of your content across the Web.

YouTube’s 73% market share gives them plenty of room to experiment. And it’s not difficult to determine why Google has stripped the ability to watch videos directly in search results. To paraphrase a famous politician, “It’s the revenue, stupid.”

At YouTube’s scale, increasing your eCPM by a few pennies adds up, particularly when there is pressure to hit your quarterly numbers. When I was at Yahoo!, employees judged how the quarter was going by how soon paid advertisements replaced previously “internal-only” spots on the front page. You were foolish to plan a launch or critical initiative the last month of a quarter that relied on front page placements because the inventory just went away.

The question is – whose video is You Tube monetizing and, if it’s yours—or one derived from your video, are you sure that you are getting your fair share ?

Google’s rise at the expense of traditional media is well-documented, but I thought the conversation would benefit from a graph plotting Google’s stock growth vs the change in paid circulation rates of Newspapers and Magazines.

Sources: Magazine Publishers Association, Newspaper Association of America, Yahoo! Finance

This is by no means meant to be a scientific analysis and I’m not claiming that these are statistically correlated; instead, the graph offers yet another data point confirming that we are indeed living in Google’s world.

And we’re not the only ones saying this: Robin Farzad at Business Week opines against Google’s “too-free press”. Jim Cramer goes a step further by saying Google ” . . . doesn’t create content, it steals it, borrows it, shares it.”

Regardless of where stand on the Google spectrum, you can’t possibly thrive in Google’s world unless you are asking questions like:

• Are you monetizing every copy of your content that appears across the Web
• Which ad networks owe you a cut of the revenue they are making off your content ?
• Is your syndication pricing optimized for the head and the tail?
• Where does your original content rank in Search Engines vs those copying it?
• Which bloggers are most effective in driving traffic back to your site?

How are you going to thrive?

Jeff Jarvis paints a clear picture on how news publishers should implement a distributed content strategy. It’s smart stuff, but the options present dizzying implications for the rest of your business. Still, you don’t want to be the AOL of the Internet access business holding on to a increasingly small set of users until you are irrelevant in the category.

So, if you were CEO, what would you do?

• Would you implement full RSS feeds for all your content?

• Partner with a company like Pluck to integrate social media into your site?

• Tear down the subscription wall to reach your best content?

• Expand your licensing team to boost revenue?

• Make it easy for your readers to mash up and share your content?

Any one of these strategies can help you succeed online. But which one and how do you measure success?

Without Web-wide visibility of your content and the tools to implement and refine your strategy, you’ll be gambling at best.

I have a love/hate relationship with SEO.  I love its promise of getting traffic for “free.”  I hate that many SEO tactics resemble a Potter-esque “Defense Against the Dark Arts” lesson.  But now with our link-building platform, marketers can embrace SEO and accurately measure its success.

With evidence that search is now the primary navigation tool to reach branded content,  ignoring link-building - a critical component of any SEO strategy - puts your brand at serious risk.  If you produce high-quality content, you are sitting on an SEO gold mine. Your content is your greatest asset online and it’s time to use it to your advantage - Patrick Altoft at Blogstorm calls it a link building machine, and I couldn’t agree more.

The New York Times realized this last year when it removed its subscription content barrier and saw traffic from Google double. And recently, Sports Illustrated unleashed its 53-year old archive of articles and photos – all the words that Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of its images and videos. As John Squires, executive vice president of Time, Inc., told the New York Times “The real hidden value of this is what it does for search. The move quadruples the site’s volume.”

So what does all this mean to marketers? Think differently about your content assets and the value of links. Unleash your articles, images and videos and allow them to drive traffic back to your site. Track those that are linking back. Correct those instances that aren’t linking back and increase your traffic and brand awareness.

We often get asked, “Do you really find everything across the Web?” In the past, our response included phrases like “Google parity”, “We find the matches that matter” with reference to examples where customers like Reuters have gained business intelligence or new monetization opportunities.

Today, our crawling team published the following nugget: Attributor now crawls over 10,000 English speaking news sites – leapfrogging Google News, the industry standard.

Clearly Google has a different monetization objectives and customer set, but that is precisely the point: Everyone at Attributor is hell-bent on providing visibility of how, where and when your content is being re-used. The search engines are not.

Are we high-fiving each other? No, but our customers are happy to be find new content monetization opportunities every day. Having Web-wide visibility and the tools to shape your content distribution helps answer questions like

• Who is using my content that should be paying for it?
• How are my licensees using my content?
• Which top ranking blogs should be linking to my site?
• Who is stealing my content and ranking higher than me in search engines?
• What are my largest, untapped content syndication opportunities?

What questions do you need to answer?