Since introducing FairShare more than a year ago, we’ve added a number of blogs and articles to our system. With a large and active following of publishers using FairShare to discover who’s using their content and where it’s being syndicated online, we now manage more then four million articles for FairShare users. In fact, we are finding an average of 17 copies of each article being syndicated across the Web.

Attributor is working hard to give our users the ability to monetize their content and benefit from revenue sharing. We work with the publishers and sites that are reusing their content, helping them claim their content and recover a portion of the revenue made from advertisements on these sites. Think of it as a monetized hyper syndication – syndicators are able to use the content, and as a result, the more the content is copied, the more money publishers make.

In the past few months we have established highly strategic relationships with ad networks, in turn allowing us to roll this service out to the general public.

Stay tuned – within a month or two you can expect Attributor to unveil something very, very interesting. In the meantime if you have any questions, hints, tips or ideas, please email me at dejan(at)attributor(dot)com.

More than a year has passed since our last Ad Server Share report, so we thought it was time to reexamine the prominence of various ad servers in the market. Attributor analyzed those that monetize content across 270 million domains, which is nearly 75% more domains and pages covered than in previous studies, including a major uptick in international sites. With expanded domain tracking capabilities, we feel this is our most comprehensive ad server report yet. The result is that more ad networks were detected with higher precision.

In all, 37 ad networks were identified. The data was then combined with compete.com’s traffic data and its vertical site category classification to provide the unique user and content category breakdowns.

 

Key Findings:

• Google and DoubleClick overwhelmingly dominate the market. Combined they account for more than 65% of the market share, which, compared to the December 2008 report, is an increase of about 9%.
• Yahoo’s share has decreased by more than 5%, or half of its previous share from the December 2008 report.
• AOL and AudienceScience follow, beating both Yahoo and MSN.
• Between Google and DoubleClick, Google dominates the smaller sites (less than 1 million views) whereas their market share is about the same on the larger sites (more than 1 million views)
• AOL’s market share has increased partly due to its acquisition of Adtech. Adtech is quite strong on European websites (e.g. sky network sites including sky.com, skysports.com etc).
• AudienceScience is strong on news sites like CNN.com, USAToday.com, WashingtonPost.com, etc. In fact, on these news sites, AudienceScience is ahead of both Google and DoubleClick taken separately.



Market Share for Large Sites (Greater than 1 million unique users) – DoubleClick and Google dominate and about equal size; both combined capture 62% of the entire market. AOL and AudienceScience are ahead of both MSN and Yahoo.

Market Share for Small Sites (less than 1 million unique users) – Google dominates and captures about 50% of the entire market and combined with DoubleClick captures more than 70% of the market. MSN and Yahoo now behind AOL, AudienceScience, Value Click and Kontera.

 

Market Share Large Sites and Small Sites

*Above information in a tabular format for easy comparison purposes

Ad Network	Market Share Large Sites	Market Share Small Sites
DoubleClick	33.46%	22.96%
Google	28.54%	49.26%
AOL	9.33%	3.73%
AudienceScience	8.50%	4.21%
MSN	5.33%	1.91%
Yahoo	5.31%	2.95%
ValueClick	2.79%	3.21%
Kontera	1.24%	3.04%

 

Market Share for Auto Sites (as categorized by Compete) – DoubleClick dominates, but AudienceScience has 2% lead over Google.

Market Share for News Sites – AudienceScience dominates everyone including Google and Double Click.

 

Market Share for Shopping Sites (as categorized by Compete) – DoubleClick and Google dominate followed by Value Click and others.

 

Market Share for Blog Sites (as categorized by Compete) – Google and DoubleClick dominate followed by AOL and Kontera.

 

Market Share for Travel Sites (as categorized by Compete) – Google and DoubleClick dominate followed by MSN and AOL.

 

Note: We have data for other categories such as Health and Government (all categorized by Compete) and also Finance and Social Networks. All these categories demonstrate dominance of Google and Double Click. We can plot them if needed.

Methodology:

The methodology described below is the same as the previous studies from 2008 with the following execution improvements:

• More pages were processed (270 million as compared to 75 million) as a result of greater capacity and longer collection period.
• More Ad Networks were detected with higher precision.

Attributor analyzed the ad server calls across 270 million domains as part of its May 2009 – March 2010 crawling operations. There were 37 ad networks that could be identified. The data was then combined with compete.com’s traffic data and its vertical site category classification to provide the unique user and content category breakdowns. Each share total represents the sum of all ad networks owned by each company, with Google as the exception in which DoubleClick and AdSense are displayed separately. For example, Atlas DMT share is counted within Microsoft share numbers and Advertising.com is included in AOL share numbers. A full list of this breakdown is available on request.

We will continue to provide details and research about Ad Server statistics. For more information, contact info@attributor.com. To download the study in its entirety, click here.

Today, the Fair Syndication Consortium announced a new study on the reuse and monetization of U.S. newspaper content.  A .pdf copy of the research can be found here.

There are several interesting findings contained in the report including the astounding fact that 75,000 different web sites reused U.S. newspaper content without permission over the 30 day period ending Nov 15th.

While the debate over the future of journalism continues to rage, it’s clear that newspaper content is supporting a thriving cottage industry that leverages major online advertising platforms to siphon advertising revenue away from newspaper sites around the world.

The Google ad serving juggernaut appears secure even if Microsoft and Yahoo agree on a deal to merge their search advertising businesses.   Our analysis of ad server calls across 75 million domains shows that both Yahoo and Microsoft lost significant share compared to our March report and now make up less than 15% of the total market.

The explosion of new ad networks in 2008 had an impact, but only one newcomer  – Revenue Science- broke into the top 5.   Unsurprisingly, Google’s AdSense is dominant on smaller sites while Google-owned DoubleClick leads on larger sites; however AdSense made great strides on larger sites, leapfrogging Yahoo into 2nd place.

Read on for more details including new breakouts by content category. If you are a publisher looking to tap into the viral syndication of your content, please contact us for a free report on how your content is monetized across the Web.

Key Findings

• DoubleClick and AdSense  continue to dominate ad server market share, capturing 31% and 26% of Unique Users, respectively.

• DoubleClick continues to own the “Head” while AdSense owns the “Tail”.

• For larger sites with over 1MM Monthly Unique Users, DoubleClick has a 36% share, a nearly 3x share advantage over its nearest non-Google competitor, Yahoo. Together, AdSense and DoubleClick capture 54% of this segment.

• For smaller sites with less than 1MM Monthly Unique Users, AdSense has a 38% share, a more than 7x share advantage over its nearest competitor, ValueClick.  Together, Google and DoubleClick capture 60% of this segment.

• Share positions for the ‘Big 3’ – DoubleClick, AdSense and Yahoo – vary widely by vertical.

• DoubleClick share is strongest on Automotive sites (58%), whereas AdSense rules Blog sites (40%).  Yahoo is strongest on Health sites (13%).

• AdSense has gained  2 points of share on large sites while Yahoo has lost 4 points since the March report.

Overall Ad Server Market Share

Ad Server Market Share Breakdown by Site Traffic

Ad Server Market Share Breakdown for Selected Content Categories

Methodology

Attributor analyzed the ad server calls across 75 Million domains as part of its October 2008 crawling operations.  For a refresher on the difference between an Ad Server and Ad Network, there is a good description here .   The data was then combined with compete.com’s October 2008 traffic data and its vertical site category classification to provide the unique user and content category breakdowns.   Each share total represents the sum of all ad networks owned by each company, with Google as the exception in which DoubleClick and AdSense are displayed separately.  For example, Atlas DMT share is counted within Microsoft share numbers and Advertising.com is included in AOL share numbers.

*** Update 12/19/08 ***

After speaking with the folks at OpenX, a popular free ad server for publishers,  we discovered that we were not detecting their share correctly.  We are working with them to fix for our next release.

If you’re a publisher, the recent months have not been kind.  Large brand advertisers are pulling back on their spending, and depending on which analyst is talking Internet advertising has either slowed or started to decline.

Logically, publishers are hunkering down and looking for ways to incrementally boost the audience and cpms from their own sites.

We can help you achieve revenue growth by tapping into the audience that is already viewing your virally syndicated articles on other sites.   For the first time, publishers can quantify their off-site audience and, by identifying how your content is monetized,  access an incremental revenue stream that averaged over $150,000 annually for each publisher in our study.

See below for our key findings – for a full copy of the study including FAQs on the methodology, please download the .pdf

What we did:

• Loaded the full feeds from over 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories.
• Found web-wide reuse across 30 Billion pages during Sept. ‘08, discarding identifiable licensed copies.
• Eliminated any pages in which the reuse was less than 50% and less than 125 words of the original article.
• Calculated the off-site page view opportunity using estimate data provided by Compete.com.
• Calculated the audience multiplier for each publisher site and for 10 top categories.  This is the audience opportunity. expressed as a multiple of the page views on the destination site.

What we found:

• Across all sites in the study, publishers have an untapped off-site audience that is nearly 1.5 times the size of the audience that visits their destination site
• While each category has incremental opportunity, the auto and travel content categories have the largest off-site audience.
• Using a cpm of $1, 42 percent of publishers studied are missing out on up to $50k in annual ad revenue; 33 percent are missing out on up to $250k in annual ad revenue and 25 percent are missing out on more than $250k in annual ad revenue from off-site content.

Want to find out your TrueAudience™?

It’s very simple (and free).  Fill out a short form. One of our team members will contact you for your RSS feed and a list of licensees after which Attributor does all the work. You can expect to receive your free report in about a week.

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.

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.