Since introducing FairShare more than a year ago, we’ve added a number of blogs and articles to our system. With a large and active following of publishers using FairShare to discover who’s using their content and where it’s being syndicated online, we now manage more then four million articles for FairShare users. In fact, we are finding an average of 17 copies of each article being syndicated across the Web.

Attributor is working hard to give our users the ability to monetize their content and benefit from revenue sharing. We work with the publishers and sites that are reusing their content, helping them claim their content and recover a portion of the revenue made from advertisements on these sites. Think of it as a monetized hyper syndication – syndicators are able to use the content, and as a result, the more the content is copied, the more money publishers make.

In the past few months we have established highly strategic relationships with ad networks, in turn allowing us to roll this service out to the general public.

Stay tuned – within a month or two you can expect Attributor to unveil something very, very interesting. In the meantime if you have any questions, hints, tips or ideas, please email me at dejan(at)attributor(dot)com.

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.

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.

One of my favorite parts of my job involves hypothesizing about which types or genres of content might be copied frequently and then testing my theories live.

Diving into recipe copying felt very natural for me – I am an aspiring chef who has taken more amateur cooking classes than I’d like to admit. I love to try out new recipes on my unsuspecting family and—unlike my mother’s generation—don’t have to pore through unwieldy, batter-splattered cookbooks to find a new way to make chicken.

As it turns out, many of the recipes I find online are copies. Jennifer Guevin of CNET wrote an in-depth piece on our study of recipe duplication online, but here are the highlights.

What we did:

• Loaded 37,000 publicly available recipes from Epicurious.com, Allrecipes.com and RachelRaymag.com
• Let Attributor scan for matches or copies of the recipes.
• Reviewed the matches and used Attributor’s % copied sorting feature to eliminate those that seemed to be derivatives, rather than copies of the original.
• Took a random sampling of the recipes and plugged the recipe titles into Google search.

What we found:

• Over 10,000 copies of the recipes were spread over 3,000 different sites.
• Most were almost word-for-word copies. Across all matches, the average % copied was over 70%.
• 57% of the sites with copied recipes had ads on their pages.
• 60% of the sites with copied recipes failed to link back to the original recipe site.
• For over 50% of the recipes we put into Google search, the copied recipe had a higher search rank than the original.

What it means:

Recipe Sites are definitely losing out on traffic. Using a conservative methodology that excludes the search engine impact of copies outranking the original, we estimate recipe sites are losing ~13% of their monthly traffic to recipe copying.

Will the recipe sites want to send DMCA Takedown notices to the 3,000 sites copying their content? Probably not.

Might they want to request each copying site to link back to their original recipe site? I think so, especially when the recipe sites realize the impact these links would have on their search engine rankings. Links are a critical part of search engine rankings, and anyone who publishes original content needs to understand it.

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!