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.

For those keeping track, Google announced in April they were very close to launching a new filtering system, dubbed “Claim Your Content”. The system would give content owners automated tools to identify copyrighted material for removal. Later, in July, an attorney representing Google said they were planning to roll out Claim Your Content in September.

The industry relaxed a bit. Bloggers rejoiced. Lawyers started to look for new sources of litigation.

It was a great step for the online content economy – at last, the industry would have the transparency and accountability required to support the motivations of those who create and publish valuable content.

Today is the first of October, and still no word from Mountain View. And while everyone waits, some point out that Google continues to profit from sites with unauthorized copies of original content.

Is Google delaying the launch to milk even more out of its immensely profitable search engine? I doubt it. A better explanation for the delay might be the realization of the major challenges involved in getting this right.

You might ask, what’s hard about anything for Google? Here’s what I think are the six reasons it is particularly difficult for Google to do this right:

1. Removal across Google’s main index. Everyone focuses on YouTube’s responsibilities as a hosting site, but since Google is the world’s leading search engine, shouldn’t Google also scan and remove instances of pages with that video in the broader Google index, even when hosted on another site? That’s not an unreasonable expectation, particularly if – as at least one analyst believes –Google is already applying digital fingerprinting to content to improve their web indexing and eliminate duplication.

2. Removal from AdSense network. Google’s AdSense is the fuel that makes much of the online economy go. So if Google removes a video from YouTube but it shows up on another site that has AdSense ads, why shouldn’t the owner expect that Google would remove those ads – as Google’s own policy promises?

3. Removal across the Web. Google has a commanding lead with YouTube, but there are hundreds of thousands of sites that host or embed videos. Without a Web-wide solution, publishers will have no visibility into content popping up on the latest social network, blog or hosting site. Unless Google can make those content claims count across the Web, no individual site has much incentive to go legit, since they know this just gives the edge to less conscientious competitors.

4. A solution for all media types. Video may get all the press, but text is still the Internet’s navigational currency. The text on your site powers your ads and search rank, but text content also supports splogs and useless made-for-AdSense pages. Images make the Web worth viewing, yet nine out of 10 Web images may involve infringement. Can Google expect to bring all types of media together in universal search results, but only let you claim your content when it is a video?

5. Available to publishers of all sizes. I’m sure Google gets this one – they practically invented the “long tail” and realize that success is not just about satisfying Viacom and Disney. But that means that any publisher large or small must be able to stake their claim and have it count.

6. Independent and unbiased. For publishers to feel confident in a content claiming system, they must believe that it works without conflict of interest. Since Google controls and monetizes most search results and puts ads across more content pages than any other ad network, what extra steps must Google take to gain the confidence of publishers that their claims will always count, and that questions of fair use will be resolved objectively?

A long list for sure, but nobody said it would be easy. There’s no doubt Google believes in the potential of the online content economy – that’s why they paid $1.65 billion dollars for YouTube. The question is: Given Google’s unique role in the content economy, are they really in a position to make it work?

What do you think is a must-have for Claim Your Content? Any predictions for its eventual roll-out date?