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!