Today, Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor, contributes his second post about online gaming piracy. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares new insight again today.

In a recent post, we talked a bit about online game piracy and our first set of numbers as they relate to Wii games. We searched for 15 games and found each game on the web and roughly 16 different pages that provided us with links to each game hosted on multiple different file hosting sites (sometimes also called cyberlockers).

In this post, we’ll examine a rather interesting popularity question: “Who is the most pirated one of all?” To do so, we used the list of top 10 games from gamespot.com for each of the 3 top consoles (Wii, Xbox, PS3). We also used the top 10 games for the PC market. We then crawled the web to find links to these games on the top 25 file hosting sites. As a disclaimer, a problem with this method arises from the fact that not all games exist on all four platforms and one of the platforms might have more popular games than the others. Since we are looking at the top 10 most popular games for each platform, this problem is largely marginalized, though not entirely eliminated.

As in the previous study, we dumped the pages from the production system for each platform and then verified them. The results were really interesting:

As far as the consoles go, Wii games resulted in most pages with links to games. We found 220 pages with links to Wii games. Xbox and PS3 have much lower rates of piracy as we found only 59 and 22 pages respectively. The PC games were the absolute winner in terms of piracy. We found 50% more pages for the top 10 PC games than for Wii. The most popular copied game out there is “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” for PCs with 82 pages linking to ISO files. It is followed immediately by “Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing” for Wii with 79 pages linking to ISOs.

My hunch is that these numbers can be explained through ease of piracy for a given console. Piracy for PC and Wii games require pretty much just copying the CDs. PS3 and Xbox require a bit more effort in hardware.

In conducting this research, I came across an interesting post on Shack News about the most pirated Japanese DS and PSP games. The claim is that the top two games on Nintendo DS and PSP were downloaded 2 million and 5 million times, respectively. While we didn’t look at piracy for those two consoles, the numbers of downloads are staggering. With average game price of around $30 the potential loss to developers is huge.

To top these numbers, CESA came out with a report saying total piracy loss from 2004 to 2009 was around $41B. While this report needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the numbers are again huge.

In the next post, we will take a peek at game copying on P2P networks and attempt to quantify the value there as well.

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!

Today, we are thrilled to announce our latest round of funding from previous investors Sigma Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Selby Venture Partners. The $3.2 million in financing will help us deepen our leadership in the industry and advance our technology so that we can support even more publishers around the world.

With their continued financial support, our VC partners recognize the need for a solution that gives today’s publishers ways to make money from their online content. Key players in the publishing industry continue to endorse our vision and confirm our leadership. As Greg Gretsch with Sigma Partners put it, “We believe Attributor has the best solution available to help publishers succeed in the digital world.”

The visibility that our technology provides helps publishers stop piracy, while the analytics enable more revenue opportunities. With this latest infusion of capital, we have an even greater ability to expand our infrastructure and will continue to develop the product in order to address the growing needs of book, newspaper and magazine publishers in a rapidly evolving online landscape.

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

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.

In follow-up to our research reports on the extent of U.S. newspaper content reuse and online book piracy, we recently set out to look at infringement of magazines on the Web. We were surprised by a number of findings, including the fact that infringement of magazines paralleled that of books, as opposed to newspapers. A majority of magazine piracy is in the form of full-issue downloads as opposed to cut-and-paste text reuse. This is significant for a number of reasons, but the most important is the very fact that magazines are so commonly being hosted and downloaded in their entirety.

Our research looks at a segment of the magazine industry, 133 English language magazine titles, and the infringement that occurs on just 20 of the more than 2,000 domains that illegally host full-issue downloads of these magazines.

Because this report focuses on downloads, and the complete download numbers for these magazine issues are not available, we’re unable to provide the depth of analysis that we wanted. We did not want to make estimations or projections on download numbers, potential views or potential lost revenue without more accurate figures to base it on. We believe there’s more research to be done on magazine piracy and plan to dig deeper into the article-based content reuse in the coming months for a more complete picture of the problem.

That said, it’s important to note that we have not attempted to estimate what it means for the larger industry, but we do believe this research shows that 1) magazine piracy occurs commonly on the Web and 2) it is causing publishers to lose sales.

The research has two parts; first, we look at the entire library of 133 magazine titles and instances of issues available for download, and second, we look at cases of infringement for just the most recent issue, March 2010.

The complete report is below and can be downloaded here.

• As part of its ongoing crawling operations, Attributor estimates that there are more than 2,000 domains (cyberlockers and torrents) that host infringing copies of magazines. An infringement is defined as a full-issue copy of a magazine that is available for download.

• During a 1-week period in March 2010, Attributor followed the complete library (all issues) of 133 English language magazines on 20 of these infringing sites. (*The sites were selected based on high frequency of infringement found through Attributor’s book service. A complete list of these 20 sites is available upon request.)

1. Attributor’s technology verified 3,996 instances of downloadable, full issues of these 133 magazines on these 20 sites.
2. 84 of the 133 (63%) magazines had infringements.
3. These 84 magazines averaged 48 infringements each.
4. The rate of infringement varied by category.
5. Top 5 sites contribute 85% of all infringements. Attributor’s research for publications in other languages indicates that while infringements of publications in a particular language tend to be concentrated on a small number of sites, the particular sites vary greatly by language.

• Attributor also looked at infringements that occur soon after an issue is published as that presumably has a direct impact on newsstand sales. To shed light on that, Attributor performed a secondary count of only the March 2010 editions of the top 30 infringed magazines in the data reported above

1. An average of 33 infringements was found for these issues.
2. The details are as follows:

Attributor is not attempting to make any estimate about the total number of illegal downloads that is occurring for these magazines or about the consequent loss in revenue to these magazine publishers with this brief study. Nevertheless, it is clear that magazine piracy occurs commonly on the Internet.

We enter the new decade with an ongoing sense of enthusiasm about our publishing customers and the potential for their industry. We consider it great validation and acknowledgment of our work at Attributor, including the Fair Syndication Consortium’s progress towards an ad-supported syndication platform, that Outsell, a leading research and advisory firm focused on the publishing and information industries, recently named Attributor to its ’30 to Watch’ list in their report, “Information Industry Outlook 2010: A New Dawn, New Day, New Decade.”The report highlights companies who they believe will have an important impact on the publishing- and information-provider community.

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.

YouTube’s 73% market share gives them plenty of room to experiment. And it’s not difficult to determine why Google has stripped the ability to watch videos directly in search results. To paraphrase a famous politician, “It’s the revenue, stupid.”

At YouTube’s scale, increasing your eCPM by a few pennies adds up, particularly when there is pressure to hit your quarterly numbers. When I was at Yahoo!, employees judged how the quarter was going by how soon paid advertisements replaced previously “internal-only” spots on the front page. You were foolish to plan a launch or critical initiative the last month of a quarter that relied on front page placements because the inventory just went away.

The question is – whose video is You Tube monetizing and, if it’s yours—or one derived from your video, are you sure that you are getting your fair share ?

We often get asked, “Do you really find everything across the Web?” In the past, our response included phrases like “Google parity”, “We find the matches that matter” with reference to examples where customers like Reuters have gained business intelligence or new monetization opportunities.

Today, our crawling team published the following nugget: Attributor now crawls over 10,000 English speaking news sites – leapfrogging Google News, the industry standard.

Clearly Google has a different monetization objectives and customer set, but that is precisely the point: Everyone at Attributor is hell-bent on providing visibility of how, where and when your content is being re-used. The search engines are not.

Are we high-fiving each other? No, but our customers are happy to be find new content monetization opportunities every day. Having Web-wide visibility and the tools to shape your content distribution helps answer questions like

• Who is using my content that should be paying for it?
• How are my licensees using my content?
• Which top ranking blogs should be linking to my site?
• Who is stealing my content and ranking higher than me in search engines?
• What are my largest, untapped content syndication opportunities?

What questions do you need to answer?

Today’s headlines brought news that more publishers are abandoning ad networks in favor of their own. It started with Martha Stewart and expanded to ESPN and Forbes. Media companies are understandably growing tired of Google, Advertising.com and other ad networks profiting off their content.

One critique of this approach is the ability of publishers to monetize the long tail – thousands of individual web sites where Google and others have much greater coverage. Setting up licensing agreements with these sites is simply not feasible for most publishers.

But there is a solution for publishers to participate in the long tail without losing the ability to monetize.

The first step requires identifying each instance where your content is republished across the Internet. You’d be surprised at the republishing rate – on average, we find 20 copies of each article that we track. Over 60% of these have ads, and Attributor is able to identify which ad network is present.

The second step is to negotiate a direct ad sharing relationship with the ad network, in effect sending the ad network an invoice for a revenue share to go straight to you. After all, it is your content and the technology already exists to accomplish this.

But it doesn’t have to stop there. It is also possible to ensure that the ads you sell follow your content, regardless of the site on which your content is republished. Safeguards would need to be added to protect your advertisers’ brands from appearing on dodgy sites, but that’s the easy part. Instead of fighting the Internet as a distribution channel, you can embrace it by setting your content free and monetizing it every step of the way.

Super distribution, cut and paste web, widget economy . . . a collection of buzz words that fuel the conference circuit, yet each term describes a well-documented fact — consumers are interacting with content where they want to, not where you tell them to.

Sumner Redstone called this out in a recent Forbes article: “We are now in a fragmented search economy, which means we need to extend our content beyond our own destination sites so consumers can reach it more easily … The content mountain has officially relocated.”

Or, maybe the mountain has blown up.

So how do you put your content mountain back together?

The first step is to find all the pieces. Where does your content exist across the web? How much is being copied and discussed in the blogosphere? In which social networks is it being copied?

Next you need to classify each piece so you can treat each piece correctly. Key questions include: Which sites copied most or all of your content? How many have ads on them? How much traffic are these sites receiving? Which ones appear higher in search engine rankings than your original?

You’ll be surprised by what you find – in many cases, we’re finding a copy rate of >10x, that is the average article is being copied over ten times.

Now comes the fun and challenging part, deciding how to re-build your content mountain. We’ll give you the following tools:

• You can reap huge benefits just by asking each copying site to credit you with a link back to your site. Your marketing team will favor this approach as links equate to increasing your rank in Google and driving more traffic back to your site. Search Engine Optimization is still a black art to many, but one fact is well documented: To get highly ranked in Google, you need to make your site ‘important’ in Google’s eyes and, to do that, your site must have good inbound links – as many as possible.
• Perhaps the best sales lead of all is a highly trafficked commercial site that consistently copies your content. Given the ease in which ad networks have made it to share the proceeds, incremental revenue can be an email or phone call away.
• Lastly, you could decide that you want to prevent the scores of sites copying your content from sharing with others. Attributor supports this scenario with an efficient take-down notice process – notices that extend to the search engines and ad networks as well as the host site.

While Attributor can provide you with the map where your content resides and several tools with which to act, the blueprint for putting it back together is up to you . One thing is certain – you need a way to generate value for each content piece that exists off your site.