I’d take this a step further – content is indeed advertising, but content also drive links. In the Google Economy, adding links is the best way to drive traffic back to your site.

Savvy publishers understand this – in September of last year, The New York Times boldly unleashed its subscription content making it available for free. The Times has been handsomely rewarded by doubling the amount of traffic received from Google. Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated jumped in, releasing every article, image or video published in the last 50 years in order to “pop up” in search rankings.

Improved search rankings will certainly boost traffic back to your site, but there are additional brand awareness benefits, particularly if you have image or video content. Google, Yahoo and MSN are rapidly integrating multi-media results into their Search Engine Results pages, often referred to as blended or universal search. According to comScore, 17% of searchers received universal search results in January, 2008.

So what does this all mean to marketers? Unleash your article, image and video assets and allow it to drive traffic back to your site and increase your brand awareness. Without a doubt, it’s a more effective way for you to penetrate social media than blinking banner ads.

So what can you do about it? At first glance, the options appear limited.

1. Call your lawyer and hope they can deal with it . . . quietly
2. Stick your head in the sand and let others profit from your work as it leaves your site.
3. Limit what you publish online, turning off the most powerful distribution channel on the planet.
4. Hire a sales force and treat every reuse opportunity as a sales lead just like Reuters is doing.

For many, the last option is clearly best. Your content leaves your site but you continue to get paid for it, either through ad share or a license fee . . . regardless of where it appears or which ad network is monetizing it.

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a sales force, and, frankly, the market for your content may not as established as Reuters. Or maybe, they are only using a portion of your content.
But wait, there is another option – securing a link back to your content for each instance of re-use.

Why are links important? Google, Yahoo and MSN all base their search results on the number of inbound links to your site. If you aren’t paying attention to the number of links you receive, you’re probably not ranking highly in the search engines and you’re definitely losing out on traffic and customers.

How much is a link worth? It depends, but probably more than you think. According to Mesa-Ariz.-based Text Link Brokers, clients pay between $15 to $1,000 a month for a single link and $600,000 for a full service link building campaign.

And guess what – if your content is similar to categories we’ve analyzed, we’re not talking about a single link or handful of links. It varies by category, but in most cateogries we’re finding 10+ copies of every article that we track. In a search economy dominated by Google, this represents a tremendous traffic building opportunity.

Do search results impact traffic for other media types? Google announcement of universal search results – showing images, videos and text in a single result set – has already been embraced by Yahoo and indicates that search will become an increasingly more important channel for traffic across all media types.

So, I submit to those who know their content is being copied and care about it – there are new ways to act upon reuse so you can capture value for your content. It starts with links and, based on our product roadmap, will lead to even more direct monetization.