Super distribution, cut and paste web, widget economy . . . a collection of buzz words that fuel the conference circuit, yet each term describes a well-documented fact — consumers are interacting with content where they want to, not where you tell them to.

Sumner Redstone called this out in a recent Forbes article: “We are now in a fragmented search economy, which means we need to extend our content beyond our own destination sites so consumers can reach it more easily … The content mountain has officially relocated.”

Or, maybe the mountain has blown up.

So how do you put your content mountain back together?

The first step is to find all the pieces. Where does your content exist across the web? How much is being copied and discussed in the blogosphere? In which social networks is it being copied?

Next you need to classify each piece so you can treat each piece correctly. Key questions include: Which sites copied most or all of your content? How many have ads on them? How much traffic are these sites receiving? Which ones appear higher in search engine rankings than your original?

You’ll be surprised by what you find – in many cases, we’re finding a copy rate of >10x, that is the average article is being copied over ten times.

Now comes the fun and challenging part, deciding how to re-build your content mountain. We’ll give you the following tools:

• You can reap huge benefits just by asking each copying site to credit you with a link back to your site. Your marketing team will favor this approach as links equate to increasing your rank in Google and driving more traffic back to your site. Search Engine Optimization is still a black art to many, but one fact is well documented: To get highly ranked in Google, you need to make your site ‘important’ in Google’s eyes and, to do that, your site must have good inbound links – as many as possible.
• Perhaps the best sales lead of all is a highly trafficked commercial site that consistently copies your content. Given the ease in which ad networks have made it to share the proceeds, incremental revenue can be an email or phone call away.
• Lastly, you could decide that you want to prevent the scores of sites copying your content from sharing with others. Attributor supports this scenario with an efficient take-down notice process – notices that extend to the search engines and ad networks as well as the host site.

While Attributor can provide you with the map where your content resides and several tools with which to act, the blueprint for putting it back together is up to you . One thing is certain – you need a way to generate value for each content piece that exists off your site.

Web advertising networks – which include those run by Google, Yahoo and MSN – do a great job presenting advertisements that are highly relevant to the content on any web page.  The question is, how often does the revenue from those ads actually reach the folks who create and own the content?

Our recent study on music lyrics illustrates the magnitude of this issue very well. First some background – last April, Yahoo Music partnered with Gracenote and became the first site to publish “official” song lyrics. The USA Today reported that Yahoo shares with the copyright holders the revenue from the ads that will be displayed alongside the lyrics. Just last week, MTV and AOL announced that they would also promote official lyrics on their web sites.

Why so much attention to song lyrics? It all comes down to Search. According to an Ask.com study, the term “song lyrics” was the 6th most popular search query last year.

What we did:

• Loaded lyrics from the following 14 songs into Attributor in mid-September: Umbrella (Rihanna), Before He Cheats (Carrie Underwood), Big Girls Don’t Cry (Fergie), Bleed it Out (Linkin Park), Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston), You Can’t Stop the Beat (Hairspray Soundtrack), Can’t Tell Me Nothing (Kanye West), The Pretender (Foo Fighters), Stronger (Kanye West), Plies (Shawty), I Get Money (50 Cent), Let it Go (Keyshia Cole), Ayo Technology (50 Cent) and Good Life (Kanye West)
• The service then scanned billions of pages across the web to find copies of the songs
• For each song we compared the search engine ranking of Yahoo Music’s “official” version with the copies on Google and Yahoo search engines

What we found:

• 1524 nearly exact copies across 300 different sites
• 57% of the copies had ads on the pages
• None of the copies contained links back to the official version at Yahoo Music
• 100% of Google searches ranked the copying site higher than the official version when searching with terms for “Song + lyrics (e.g. “stronger lyrics”)
• 81% of Yahoo Searches ranked the copying site higher than the official version using the same search terms
• To view the entire study and find out how much more Kanye West’s new album was copied than 50 Cent’s new release, please download the .pdf

So what can newspapers, magazines and writers do to capture full value for their original content? The first step is understanding how and where your content is being copied. With this information, you can decide how to act through Attributor:

• Request a link back to your original improving your search engine ranking.
• Ask the site to deposit a % of the revenue they make from your content into your AdSense account.
• Send a formal DMCA takedown notice – we will ensure that it gets taken down from search engines.

Last week, Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms, told the American Magazine Conference, “Don’t fear Google”. With Google’s AdSense revenues surpassing $5 Billion a year, “Fear” is the wrong term. How about making Google and the other search engines accountable?