Google’s rise at the expense of traditional media is well-documented, but I thought the conversation would benefit from a graph plotting Google’s stock growth vs the change in paid circulation rates of Newspapers and Magazines.

Sources: Magazine Publishers Association, Newspaper Association of America, Yahoo! Finance

This is by no means meant to be a scientific analysis and I’m not claiming that these are statistically correlated; instead, the graph offers yet another data point confirming that we are indeed living in Google’s world.

And we’re not the only ones saying this: Robin Farzad at Business Week opines against Google’s “too-free press”. Jim Cramer goes a step further by saying Google ” . . . doesn’t create content, it steals it, borrows it, shares it.”

Regardless of where stand on the Google spectrum, you can’t possibly thrive in Google’s world unless you are asking questions like:

• Are you monetizing every copy of your content that appears across the Web
• Which ad networks owe you a cut of the revenue they are making off your content ?
• Is your syndication pricing optimized for the head and the tail?
• Where does your original content rank in Search Engines vs those copying it?
• Which bloggers are most effective in driving traffic back to your site?

How are you going to thrive?

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?

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.

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.

As we roll more customers into our beta program, it’s evident that publishers are bursting with questions that only web-wide visibility can answer. Here are some of the top ones we’ve heard and plan to deliver:

- More accurate read of your content’s reach. Attributor will provide a comprehensive analysis of your content’s web-wide reach by going beyond link-tracking and including all matches where significant excerpts of your content are re-used within html pages.

- Trend Analysis for all your content, not just the top tier. From a single screen, you will be able to monitor the re-use of all your content. If you create multiple types of content (e.g. sports, entertainment, etc) you can rank each category against each other. Test and measure the impact of editorial changes across the Internet.

- More granularity of how your content is being re-used: Not all re-use is alike. Attributor will allow you to generate meaningful insights by analyzing re-use within various segments including:

• Licensed or unauthorized use: Which licensees are using your content actively? Who is going beyond the license scope? Which licensees are not using it at all? How can you package licenses more attractively?
• Commercial or non-commercial use: What type of content or which authors are getting consistently re-used commercially and generating downstream value?
• Search Engine Placement: Which sites are copying your content with a higher search engine ranking than you?

- Insights that span across all media types: Attributor will help you understand the audience lift by adding additional media to your content, including videos, podcasts and images? Which headline and which photo spread the furthest? What is the impact of adding a photo or image to content across licensees and the rest of the web?

That’s just a few - tell us what insights you’re seeking. We’re listening!

As you steer your media businesses towards an increasingly digital future, you’re going to need tools to help maximize your digital media profit. Here’s how Attributor can help across the organization:

Sales: Increase revenue by quantifying use by your licensees, identifying areas where the current license scope needs to be brought up to date, and identifying new license prospects.
Marketing and Editorial: Drive more page views by tailoring your content to appeal to a wide audience - including blogs, search engines and other third party sites.
Legal: Remove unauthorized content from search engine results, and reduce costs by automating removal notices and evidentiary support.
Business Development: Gain leverage with your strategic distribution partners through full visibility of re-use.

We’re excited to have the Associated Press as our first customer and look forward to providing publishers of all sizes and media types with the infrastructure required to succeed in a digital future.