The buzz around ad networks and ad serving technologies couldn’t be louder: The Google/DoubleClick merger is moving forward, new ad exchanges continue to pop up on a monthly basis, and just last week Forbes and ESPN followed Martha Stewart’s lead to start their own ad network.

Last week’s actions prove that publishers want a piece of the online advertising pie. After analyzing content monetization across 68 million domains, it’s clear that publishers have a huge opportunity to collect revenue directly from ad networks. (If you are like me and need a refresher on the difference between an Ad Server and an Ad Network, there is a good description here .)

What we did:

We analyzed the ad-server calls across 68 million domains captured from our January, 2008 crawling operations. The data was joined with January, 2008 unique user data from our friends at Compete to determine market share numbers.

What we found:

• DoubleClick and Google dominate overall market share capturing 35% and 34% of unique users, respectively.
• DoubleClick owns the head and Google owns the tail. For sites with over 1MM monthly unique users, Doubleclick has a 48% share, a 3x advantage over 2nd place Yahoo. For sites with less than 100k monthly unique users, Google has an 8x share advantage over 2nd place MSN.
• Professionally produced content is widely proliferated across highly trafficked, commercial sites, representing an untapped opportunity for publishers to increase their revenue through content licensing, ad revenue share or link-building.

Conclusions:

• The GoogleClick combination is an ad-serving juggernaut. They should be at the top of your call list to collect a % off of every ad dollar made off your content.

• Content is proliferating all over the place - Attributor finds an average of 20 different copies for each article we track.

• There is a lot of money at stake. 64% of the copies have ads on their pages and most republishing is on sites with > 1MM monthly unique users.

• It’s an SEO goldmine. 57% of the copies we find do not link back to the original sites.

Stay tuned for regular reports on the pace at which articles, images and videos are spreading across the web and implications for the online content economy.

Methodology notes: This report represents a snapshot of ad server distribution in January, 2008 across 68 million domains Less than 5% of the domains contained more than one ad server call – in these cases, the traffic for the domain was associated with each ad network found. We did not attempt to de-duplicate the unique user numbers.

Today’s headlines brought news that more publishers are abandoning ad networks in favor of their own. It started with Martha Stewart and expanded to ESPN and Forbes. Media companies are understandably growing tired of Google, Advertising.com and other ad networks profiting off their content.

One critique of this approach is the ability of publishers to monetize the long tail - thousands of individual web sites where Google and others have much greater coverage. Setting up licensing agreements with these sites is simply not feasible for most publishers.

But there is a solution for publishers to participate in the long tail without losing the ability to monetize.

The first step requires identifying each instance where your content is republished across the Internet. You’d be surprised at the republishing rate – on average, we find 20 copies of each article that we track. Over 60% of these have ads, and Attributor is able to identify which ad network is present.

The second step is to negotiate a direct ad sharing relationship with the ad network, in effect sending the ad network an invoice for a revenue share to go straight to you. After all, it is your content and the technology already exists to accomplish this.

But it doesn’t have to stop there. It is also possible to ensure that the ads you sell follow your content, regardless of the site on which your content is republished. Safeguards would need to be added to protect your advertisers’ brands from appearing on dodgy sites, but that’s the easy part. Instead of fighting the Internet as a distribution channel, you can embrace it by setting your content free and monetizing it every step of the way.

Internet trends come and go but creating unique content has always been a key component of a successful online strategy. Back in 2000, it was all about the 3 C’s: Content, Community and Commerce. Fast forward to 2008 and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick declares that banner advertising is dying and companies should treat their content as advertising.

I’d take this a step further - content is indeed advertising, but content also drive links. In the Google Economy, adding links is the best way to drive traffic back to your site.

Savvy publishers understand this - in September of last year, The New York Times boldly unleashed its subscription content making it available for free. The Times has been handsomely rewarded by doubling the amount of traffic received from Google. Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated jumped in, releasing every article, image or video published in the last 50 years in order to “pop up” in search rankings.

Improved search rankings will certainly boost traffic back to your site, but there are additional brand awareness benefits, particularly if you have image or video content. Google, Yahoo and MSN are rapidly integrating multi-media results into their Search Engine Results pages, often referred to as blended or universal search. According to comScore, 17% of searchers received universal search results in January, 2008.

So what does this all mean to marketers? Unleash your article, image and video assets and allow it to drive traffic back to your site and increase your brand awareness. Without a doubt, it’s a more effective way for you to penetrate social media than blinking banner ads.

The friendly folks from HyveUp visited us last week as part of their mission to offer video interviews of all the Web 2.0 startups.