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?