On Friday, we found a site containing the first 10 chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This seemed like a better example of infringement than the previously analyzed spoiler page, so we plugged the chapters into Attributor and checked the results at midnight Sunday night.

Here are our findings:

• 2,806 sites lifted the book content
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 54% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 27% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 19% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter text copied is ~71%
• Over 80% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 43 different countries.

By all accounts sales of the book are phenomenal, and judging by an informal Attributor office poll, the impact on the first weekend’s sales appears to be zilch.

That said significant portions of the book continue to pop up all over the web making the downstream impact of the duplication unknown.

One thing for certain– the hysteria over the book’s release has filled many sploggers pockets. We just hope they repaid Scholastic by buying a few copies of the book!

August 1st Update

After reading about the Spanish spoiler’s release via TechCrunch, we loaded the 1st 10 Spanish chapters of the book into Attributor.

Here are our findings:

• 440 sites lifted the book content in Spanish
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 48% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 40% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 12% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter Sapnish text copied is 60%
• Over 85% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 11 different countries.

The increase in splog site duplication is further proof of how easy it is to monetize popular search terms using Adsense or Yahoo Search Marketing text links.

This is the first of a series of analyses we’ll be sharing in the coming months. We hope to provide insights on how the content economy works and how it could be better managed with web-wide visibility and accountability.

Here are some updated numbers on the spread of content lifted from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• We found 574 unique pages duplicating the spoiler content. New sites are coming in at a rate of ~20 per hour.
• The duplication is spread over 27 countries including the United States, Russia, the Netherlands, UK, China, Germany, Italy, Germany, Poland, British Virgin Islands, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Croatia, Samoa, Spain, Columbia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Peru, Mexico, Australia, Vietnam, Canada, Czech Republic, Indonesia and the Ukraine.
• Harry Potter fan sites represent ~10% of the duplication, indicating that many fans don’t want to know the ending before they buy the book; instead matches are primarily “splogger” sites–these are sites that place ads around the lifted content and game the search engines to appear high in search rankings. This enables them to profit from the increased Harry Potter search activity.

5PM Update

• There are now 708 pages duplicating the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows spoiler content. Many sites that appeared on our list in the first 12 hours have taken down the spoiler content; however, new sites are popping up at a faster rate. Attributor keeps a cached copy of all matches, and we will tally the gross match number in a future post.
• 9% of the sites duplicating the spoiler content are Harry Potter fan sites.
• 559 (79%) of the sites have ads on their pages.
• Most of the duplication is verbatim. The percentage copied across all domains is >80%
• Over the last 24 hours, duplication on Chinese sites has grown the fastest.

More info to come, including a thorough “post-game” analysis of what Attributor found.

We thought we’d enter the Harry Potter discussion from a new angle - a quantitative look at the spoiler content’s reach and insights into the types of sites who are lifting and publishing the book content.

Yesterday we added the web page that includes excerpts from the unreleased novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Attributor’s monitoring platform immediately found 312 separate reuses of the spoiler page across the Web.

The top 3 sites hosting the re-used content are

1. livejournal.com
2. groups.google.com
3. twoj.net

With Attributor, instead of having to manually search and sort through a haystack of tertiary matches, we provide specific citations where your content are being re-used and enables you to act appropriately — by issuing a licensing request, or sending automatic DMCA takedown notices. We also enable more innovative approaches such as allowing a teaser portion of your content to be posted freely as long as the reuser links back to your site or includes one of your widgets to sell the full version.

We will update the blog over the next few days with the latest numbers and analysis of the sites that are re-using the content. Watch this space and let us know what you want to find out.