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.

So back in January, we tracked pictures of over 200 female celebrities from FHM’s Sexiest Women of 2007. Based on the number of copied images we found, Megan Fox was the odds on favorite for 2008. Now, four months and 9.7 million votes later, the FHM polls have closed. The magazine revealed last week that the sexiest woman of 2008 is Megan Fox. A complete puff piece unless you are a) Megan Fox, or b) a publisher whose profits depend on creating viral content to drive your branded reach and profits.

What you need in the latter scenario are reports on yesterday’s most popular online articles, images and videos. Or perhaps, you want to drill down to see which of your writers have the highest pickup in the blogosphere last month? Need to pull up to a more macro view? Take a look at how Reuters is analyzing content trends using Attributor.

It all boils down to web-wide content visibility for your organization. Your editors can now have quantitative measurement of their work. Your sales team can hunt for licensing leads. And your search engine optimization team can build links.

Attributor may not be able to identify our era’s Zeitgeist, we can certainly report on the flavor of the week. With all due respect to Megan Fox.

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.