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.

Today’s post comes from Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations. He plays an integral role in the strategy, development and implementation of Attributor’s research, which has brought international attention to the depth of content piracy across the Internet.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares his insight for the first time today.

As Chief Crawler here at Attributor, I spend a lot of time seeing what’s on the Web. Recently, computer game software piracy caught my attention and I thought I’d take a first look at what’s happening in this industry. When I started the research, I expected the game piracy to be a well-established “trade” concentrated on just a few sites. But as it turns out, online games are being pirated even more then expected and they are available everywhere.

Since Wii is my personal favorite, I chose this as the segment of the industry to examine. For this blog post, I looked at a total of 15 games on 20 of the largest hosting sites (most of which we identified in previous research for books and magazines). The system crunched through our 40-billion-page index and found several hundreds of thousands of pages that might be relevant for these games. A page is considered relevant if it is classified as being “game related,” meaning it has a lot of keywords that are normally associated with games, has links to known hosting sites and talks about the specific game we searched for.

After the system processed all the pages, the algorithm ranked several thousand pages as almost 100% likely to contain the games in our search. During a one-day period in June 2010, Attributor professional services reviewed 300 pages from that list and found 250 pages linking to desired content, which resulted in roughly 3,200 links leading to copies of the games. We found a copy of every game we looked for. As usual, most infringements were found on rapidshare. The top 5 domains — are rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload, x7 and mediafire — were responsible for 85% of the infringements.

If we take a rather unscientific average of these numbers, we get more than 200 links found for each game and 16 pages referring to valid links for each game (keep in mind these are numbers for just one day of processing). This simply means that anybody looking for any particular Wii game can find it on 16 different sites, on average. These results show that the current state of piracy control on hosting sites is non-existent since anybody can go to a search engine and find any pirated game they want.

The distribution of hosting sites is also rather interesting, as now there is a new domain in the top 5 that we haven’t seen as prominently before, x7.to.

The next step in my project will be to look at game piracy across different platforms and see who is the most pirated out there. Stay tuned!

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

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.

We’re thrilled with the extensive operational experience Stephan brings to the company in building and managing global service organizations and serving a broad range of industries, including Internet, entertainment, software and telecommunications. Stephan comes to us from FocusFrame where he served as COO.

The addition of Stephan to our leadership team is an important step in our commitment to meeting the demands of our rapidly growing business and better serving our customers. We warmly welcome him to the team!

From day one, we’ve known that this is a complex issue with numerous players, perspectives, interests, and touch points in the content ecosystem, though we remain hopeful a solution that meets the needs of all parties is not only possible, but will provide positive benefits to the entire ecosystem.

We’re motivated by the prospect of a thriving online content economy in which content is shared openly and spread freely, with an infrastructure that supports and fairly compensates content owners and creators.

We want to be completely clear: this model is NOT about content removal. The new model IS about the economics of online content. Our initiative focuses on changing the economic benefits of using unlicensed content and doing so in a manner that strives to do as much as possible to seek an acceptable outcome before removing the content or changing the online experience for consumers. In our view, this is a CRITICAL and watershed point that underscores the very underpinnings of the guidelines and recommendations put forth by the Fair Syndication Consortium. This is about the economy of content and the ads that support it, not the content itself. We trust this is abundantly clear.

With this mission in mind, we want to share the details of this initiative, more specifically about traffic diversion and ad removal actions.

Attributor’s technology, coupled with a team of trained human reviewers, will identify full-copy reuses of unlicensed content for its publishing customers. A “full copy” is any page that contains more than 80% of the original article AND at least 125 words. This definition of full copy was defined collectively by the input of the Fair Syndication Consortium and is intentionally designed to be free of any legitimate fair use claims.

Additionally, only reusing sites with consistent, high frequency instances of full-copy reuse will be party to a graduated response outlined in the Fair Syndication Guidelines, starting with two initial notices.

It should be clear that the combination of a strict definition of full copy reuse along with a pattern of systematic reuse will impact sploggers first and foremost.

This will not impact aggregators, folks who provide original content around portions of other’s work, educational reuse, or any other form of fair use.

The first notice will let a reusing party know that multiple instances of full-copy, unlicensed content reuse has been found on their site and asks whether they have permission to use the articles in question or if they would like to enter into a discussion about fair compensation for syndicating the content. The goal here is to facilitate  a discussion and presume that an outcome agreeable for both parties can be achieved.

If for some reason a response from the reusing site is not received within 10 business days, a second notice will be sent alerting the reusing party that the pages – and only the pages with full copies of the reused content – will be removed from the major search engines and any advertisements on the reusing page will be withdrawn. The goal of this step is to further encourage a discussion and agreeable outcome between the reusing party and the content producer.

We feel that assuming a workable outcome is possible is a better alternative than jumping immediately into litigation as other companies and industries have done in the past.

As these notices are sent, we aim to provide accurate results and be transparent in our processes. We recognize that we are still in the early days of the online content economy and we hope to encourage a broader discussion about the industry and potential solutions. Some of this discussion has already started via Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter.

If you have questions or comments about our solution, philosophy or about the traffic diversion and ad removal process, please contact us at fairshare(at)attributor(dot)com.

We couldn’t agree more with Outsell’s perspective about a new year and new opportunities, as stated in their report: “Those who fly and grow are those who prepared for a new dawn, a new day and new decade. Those who have not kept up will continue to face pressures and a proverbial sunset – more challenge, and in some cases demise.”

As Outsell explains, success in the new decade will depend on creating and fostering positive, successful and engaging experiences. We look forward to working with our customers to foster this perspective and build on the successes of 2009.

Over the past several months, we’ve spoken to folks at many book publishers including one whose official title was “Book Detective”.  As we investigated the problem, we were amazed at the ease in which anyone can obtain a full copy of their favorite best seller . . . for free.   Today’s agreement with Hachette Book Group offers all book detectives some help; specifically,  best-of-breed content monitoring technology to increase the effectiveness of your anti-piracy efforts while dramatically reducing the resources required.

Our Web-wide approach, combined with the ability to detect content down to 5-second thresholds, make Attributor the ideal solution for Turner’s enormous library of animation, entertainment, and news content. Turner’s brands boast some of the most popular content on the Web, surpassing even the most popular broadcast shows in terms of distribution.  With Attributor, Turner will be able to track down that content and manage copyright enforcement across unauthorized channels.

Turner has long been a pioneer of emerging media platforms first moving from billboards to UHF in the 70s, then to cable in the 80s, and eventually launching a top 20 web site with CNN.com in the 90s.  We are thrilled to be working with them on the next great distribution platform of the Internet.

FairShare is a one-of-a-kind, free service where anyone creating text content can claim their posts, assign a CC license and understand how their work is shared across the Web.  Nothing like this exists anywhere today.

FairShare was built to enable The Sharing Economy – specifically,  to make it possible for millions of other people around the world to reuse content in a way that provides value back to the original content creator . . . value that each creator can define herself.

Through web-wide visibility, we believe FairShare encourages continuously higher quality content to be produced, distributed and consumed online.   We recognize that there are a variety of motivations for publishing online and encourage you to try FairShare and tell us how we can make it serve you better.

If you are publishing content, the Internet has eliminated the barriers to get in front of users. However, you lack insight into what happens to your content after it leaves your site, and, more importantly, you lose control over monetization.

Steve Rubel describes it as the “Cut and Paste Web” and offers three strategies for thriving. Increasingly, we’re finding that publishers view their copied content as an opportunity to extend their brand and drive traffic back to their site. On the other hand, when controlled distribution is mission critical, it’s easy to empathize with publishers who view copied content as a problem.

Whether you view copied content as a problem or an opportunity, the Internet is too important a distribution channel in which to be blind. This is where Attributor can help. We’re excited to be enabling leaders like Reuters and the Associated Press to forge ahead with their digital strategies, and we’d like to help you too.