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.

If you’re a celebrity, having your image copied across the web may be a good thing – people are talking about you and reinforcing this conversation with an image that, in most cases, puts you in a flattering context. So we thought it would be fun to look at celebrity images as a means to showcase Attributor’s web-wide monitoring capabilities and the opportunities this visibility uncovers.

This study does not attempt to make light of the issues that photographers face when confronted with unauthorized use of their work – if Lane Hartwell’s images are proliferating at even a fraction of the rate of the images on Maxim’s, FHM’s and People’s hot lists, there is an obvious impact on her business.

What we did

Attributor’s image monitoring platform scanned the web to find copies of images from two female celebrity lists, Maxim’s “2007 Hot 100” and FHM’s “100 Sexiest Women 2007″ and two male celebrity lists totaled People’s “Hottest Bachelors 2007″ and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive 2007″. The four lists totaled slightly over 220 images.

Attributor found 2,547 copies of the images across the web.

Problem or Opportunity?

There is plenty of evidence to suggest an untapped opportunity for publishers. The facts:

Are the copying sites commercial? Yes, a whopping 73% of the copying sites had ads on their pages.

How much traffic did these sites receive? According to our friends at Compete.com, about a third of the sites containing copies of the images were visited by more than 50k people in December, 2007.

Are any of the copying sites linking back to the original site? Very few – only 13% of the copies found linked back to the original or related celebrity site.

How do copies of the images rank in search engines? Very high. In fact, of the top 10 females, a copy outranked the original image in Google search results 100% of the time.

Implications for Publishers and Content Creators

Opportunities abound to harness value from your content as it leaves your site.

1. First, incremental revenue through new licenses of commercial image usage is available and ready for the taking. With web-wide visibility, finding new leads and billing existing licensees gets a lot easier.

2. Securing links to drive increased traffic is another untapped opportunity. Link building is the backbone of SEO best practices – using Attributor, you can now increase traffic on their destination sites by securing links.

3. Lastly, the findings are another reminder of images’ viral potential, waiting to be propelled by new viral content strategies. Implementing, measuring and optimizing these strategies requires web-wide, contextual visibility of where your content appears.

For a view on the lighter side of the findings, read Attributor’s 2007 Hottest Internet Celebrities.

And the award goes to…Megan Fox! Best known for her heroics against the Decepticons in the movie Transformers, Megan Fox had the most copied celebrity image on the Web out of all the images of the women on Maxim’s “2007 Hot 100” and FHM’s “100 Sexiest Women 2007”, despite her official ranking of 18^th and 65^th on those lists, respectively.

Here’s what we did:

• First, we found lists of the hottest women in 2007 from FHM and Maxim, and lists of the hottest men in 2007 from People’s “Hottest Bachelors 2007” and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive 2007”
• Next, we used Attributor’s image monitoring platform to scan the web for copies of the images.
• Finally, we reviewed the results, tallied the number of times each image was copied, painfully sorted through thousands of pictures of beautiful women, and categorized the type of site doing the copying.

The Results:

The top five most copied female celebrity images on web with the FHM and Maxim rankings shown in parentheses are:

1. Megan Fox (65,18)
2. Jessica Alba (1,2)
3. Rihanna (Not Ranked, 8 )
4. Halle Barry (16, 55)
5. Lindsay Lohan (41, 1)

Let’s not forget the men. Matt Damon will undoubtedly be pleased that he led the list of the most copied male celebrity images across both the People “Sexiest Man Alive 2007” and “Hottest Bachelors 2007” lists. His married status did not dampen Web user’s enthusiasm for his photo at all. Bachelor Matthew McConaughey, the cover photo for the “Hottest Bachelors” list, made a respectable runner-up rank in terms of his well-copied image.

The top five most copied male celebrity images from both People lists with official magazine rankings in parentheses are:

1. Matt Damon
2. Matthew McConaughey
3. Patrick Dempsey
4. James McAvoy
5. Jake Gyllenhaal

And where are these images being used most? You guessed it. Gossip sites – they represent 36% of all sites found as publishing your own gossip site appears to be the new black. Here’s a breakdown of the sites where we found the images

• Gossip Sites 36%
• Movie sites: 15%
• Fan sites: 7%
• Recognized domains that appear to be licensing the images: 7%
• Splogs: 2%
• Other 33% (Personal homepages/blogs, non-english sites)

For a more rigorous breakdown and analysis of the meaning of these results, read Attributor’s “The Untapped Potential of Celebrity Images”

Megan Fox image courtesy of Maxim, Matt Damon image courtesy of People Magazine