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.

Today, Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor, contributes his second post about online gaming piracy. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares new insight again today.

In a recent post, we talked a bit about online game piracy and our first set of numbers as they relate to Wii games. We searched for 15 games and found each game on the web and roughly 16 different pages that provided us with links to each game hosted on multiple different file hosting sites (sometimes also called cyberlockers).

In this post, we’ll examine a rather interesting popularity question: “Who is the most pirated one of all?” To do so, we used the list of top 10 games from gamespot.com for each of the 3 top consoles (Wii, Xbox, PS3). We also used the top 10 games for the PC market. We then crawled the web to find links to these games on the top 25 file hosting sites. As a disclaimer, a problem with this method arises from the fact that not all games exist on all four platforms and one of the platforms might have more popular games than the others. Since we are looking at the top 10 most popular games for each platform, this problem is largely marginalized, though not entirely eliminated.

As in the previous study, we dumped the pages from the production system for each platform and then verified them. The results were really interesting:

As far as the consoles go, Wii games resulted in most pages with links to games. We found 220 pages with links to Wii games. Xbox and PS3 have much lower rates of piracy as we found only 59 and 22 pages respectively. The PC games were the absolute winner in terms of piracy. We found 50% more pages for the top 10 PC games than for Wii. The most popular copied game out there is “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” for PCs with 82 pages linking to ISO files. It is followed immediately by “Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing” for Wii with 79 pages linking to ISOs.

My hunch is that these numbers can be explained through ease of piracy for a given console. Piracy for PC and Wii games require pretty much just copying the CDs. PS3 and Xbox require a bit more effort in hardware.

In conducting this research, I came across an interesting post on Shack News about the most pirated Japanese DS and PSP games. The claim is that the top two games on Nintendo DS and PSP were downloaded 2 million and 5 million times, respectively. While we didn’t look at piracy for those two consoles, the numbers of downloads are staggering. With average game price of around $30 the potential loss to developers is huge.

To top these numbers, CESA came out with a report saying total piracy loss from 2004 to 2009 was around $41B. While this report needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the numbers are again huge.

In the next post, we will take a peek at game copying on P2P networks and attempt to quantify the value there as well.

Today’s post comes from Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations. He plays an integral role in the strategy, development and implementation of Attributor’s research, which has brought international attention to the depth of content piracy across the Internet.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares his insight for the first time today.

As Chief Crawler here at Attributor, I spend a lot of time seeing what’s on the Web. Recently, computer game software piracy caught my attention and I thought I’d take a first look at what’s happening in this industry. When I started the research, I expected the game piracy to be a well-established “trade” concentrated on just a few sites. But as it turns out, online games are being pirated even more then expected and they are available everywhere.

Since Wii is my personal favorite, I chose this as the segment of the industry to examine. For this blog post, I looked at a total of 15 games on 20 of the largest hosting sites (most of which we identified in previous research for books and magazines). The system crunched through our 40-billion-page index and found several hundreds of thousands of pages that might be relevant for these games. A page is considered relevant if it is classified as being “game related,” meaning it has a lot of keywords that are normally associated with games, has links to known hosting sites and talks about the specific game we searched for.

After the system processed all the pages, the algorithm ranked several thousand pages as almost 100% likely to contain the games in our search. During a one-day period in June 2010, Attributor professional services reviewed 300 pages from that list and found 250 pages linking to desired content, which resulted in roughly 3,200 links leading to copies of the games. We found a copy of every game we looked for. As usual, most infringements were found on rapidshare. The top 5 domains — are rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload, x7 and mediafire — were responsible for 85% of the infringements.

If we take a rather unscientific average of these numbers, we get more than 200 links found for each game and 16 pages referring to valid links for each game (keep in mind these are numbers for just one day of processing). This simply means that anybody looking for any particular Wii game can find it on 16 different sites, on average. These results show that the current state of piracy control on hosting sites is non-existent since anybody can go to a search engine and find any pirated game they want.

The distribution of hosting sites is also rather interesting, as now there is a new domain in the top 5 that we haven’t seen as prominently before, x7.to.

The next step in my project will be to look at game piracy across different platforms and see who is the most pirated out there. Stay tuned!

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.

Jan 15th update:   At the request of a few authors, we’ve disabled the links to the infringing copies in the Example section.

Book publishers frequently ask us how much online piracy is impacting their revenue.  Today, with the release of the first study to quantify book piracy in the U.S., we’re pleased to announce new capabilities to help book publishers answer this critical question.

Key findings of the research are listed below, and the full study can be downloaded here (.pdf).

We plan to update and add more depth to these findings regularly as we expand our anti-piracy services.  If you publish books or journals and wish to see how FairShare Guardian can protect your titles, please contact us.

Key Findings

• Significant amounts of pirated book downloads are taking place online, representing potential losses of $2.75-3 billion, representing roughly 10% of the total United States book sales
• Across the 913 books included in the study, nearly 10,000 pirated copies of every title in the study was available for free download.
• The  Business and Investing, Professional & Technical and Science genres have the largest potential lost sales per title.

Source: Attributor January, 2010

Source: Attributor January, 2010

Examples

Listed below are examples of pirated titles and a link to just one of the 25 sites included in the study (Copies downloaded figures are as of 01/14/10).

• Arts and Photography
  • Architect’s Drawings by Kendra Schank Smith, 10,010 copies downloaded

• Biographies & Memoirs
  • Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, 2,850 copies downloaded

• Business & Investing
  • Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, 1,132 copies downloaded

• Culinary and Hospitality
  • Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, 659 copies downloaded

• Fiction
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 1,732 copies downloaded
  • Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts, 1,156 copies downloaded
  • Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, 8,177 copies downloaded

• Science
  • Advanced Calculus by Wilfred Kaplan, 3,526 copies downloaded
  • Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, 3,584 copies downloaded

Methodology

• FairShare Guardian™ service monitored piracy for 913 popular books in categories representative of the industry across the the top 25 one-click hosting sites starting in October 2009 for a period of 90 days.  Download .pdf copy to view list of sites.

• FairShare Guardian captured the number of successful downloads completed for each of the 913 titles as reported on four file hosting sites that make the download data available (4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com and docstoc.com).  Across these four sites, a total of 3.2 million downloads occurred.

• Across the top 25 one-click hosting sites, a total download figure of over 9 million copies was projected using the 36.4% share of one-click hosting sites that the four above-mentioned sites represent. Download .pdf copy  to view share figures.

• The retail value of these 9 million copies was calculated to reach $380 million. Each book’s retail price and category/genre information was collected from Amazon.com.

• The 913 titles in this study represent works from publishers totaling 13.5% of the U.S. book publishing market. Projecting this $380 million value to the entire industry results in total potential piracy figure of $2.8 billion.

• This study does not to answer the question, “How many of these pirated books would have been purchased legally if piracy was not an option?” Previous piracy studies assume a one-to-one substitution, meaning all pirated material would have been purchased and thus the market value of pirated books is equal to the actual loss, though Attributor feels this is an overly optimistic assumption. This issue will be addressed in a future research phase.

The Google ad serving juggernaut appears secure even if Microsoft and Yahoo agree on a deal to merge their search advertising businesses.   Our analysis of ad server calls across 75 million domains shows that both Yahoo and Microsoft lost significant share compared to our March report and now make up less than 15% of the total market.

The explosion of new ad networks in 2008 had an impact, but only one newcomer  – Revenue Science- broke into the top 5.   Unsurprisingly, Google’s AdSense is dominant on smaller sites while Google-owned DoubleClick leads on larger sites; however AdSense made great strides on larger sites, leapfrogging Yahoo into 2nd place.

Read on for more details including new breakouts by content category. If you are a publisher looking to tap into the viral syndication of your content, please contact us for a free report on how your content is monetized across the Web.

Key Findings

• DoubleClick and AdSense  continue to dominate ad server market share, capturing 31% and 26% of Unique Users, respectively.

• DoubleClick continues to own the “Head” while AdSense owns the “Tail”.

• For larger sites with over 1MM Monthly Unique Users, DoubleClick has a 36% share, a nearly 3x share advantage over its nearest non-Google competitor, Yahoo. Together, AdSense and DoubleClick capture 54% of this segment.

• For smaller sites with less than 1MM Monthly Unique Users, AdSense has a 38% share, a more than 7x share advantage over its nearest competitor, ValueClick.  Together, Google and DoubleClick capture 60% of this segment.

• Share positions for the ‘Big 3’ – DoubleClick, AdSense and Yahoo – vary widely by vertical.

• DoubleClick share is strongest on Automotive sites (58%), whereas AdSense rules Blog sites (40%).  Yahoo is strongest on Health sites (13%).

• AdSense has gained  2 points of share on large sites while Yahoo has lost 4 points since the March report.

Overall Ad Server Market Share

Ad Server Market Share Breakdown by Site Traffic

Ad Server Market Share Breakdown for Selected Content Categories

Methodology

Attributor analyzed the ad server calls across 75 Million domains as part of its October 2008 crawling operations.  For a refresher on the difference between an Ad Server and Ad Network, there is a good description here .   The data was then combined with compete.com’s October 2008 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.

*** Update 12/19/08 ***

After speaking with the folks at OpenX, a popular free ad server for publishers,  we discovered that we were not detecting their share correctly.  We are working with them to fix for our next release.

If you’re a publisher, the recent months have not been kind.  Large brand advertisers are pulling back on their spending, and depending on which analyst is talking Internet advertising has either slowed or started to decline.

Logically, publishers are hunkering down and looking for ways to incrementally boost the audience and cpms from their own sites.

We can help you achieve revenue growth by tapping into the audience that is already viewing your virally syndicated articles on other sites.   For the first time, publishers can quantify their off-site audience and, by identifying how your content is monetized,  access an incremental revenue stream that averaged over $150,000 annually for each publisher in our study.

See below for our key findings – for a full copy of the study including FAQs on the methodology, please download the .pdf

What we did:

• Loaded the full feeds from over 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories.
• Found web-wide reuse across 30 Billion pages during Sept. ‘08, discarding identifiable licensed copies.
• Eliminated any pages in which the reuse was less than 50% and less than 125 words of the original article.
• Calculated the off-site page view opportunity using estimate data provided by Compete.com.
• Calculated the audience multiplier for each publisher site and for 10 top categories.  This is the audience opportunity. expressed as a multiple of the page views on the destination site.

What we found:

• Across all sites in the study, publishers have an untapped off-site audience that is nearly 1.5 times the size of the audience that visits their destination site
• While each category has incremental opportunity, the auto and travel content categories have the largest off-site audience.
• Using a cpm of $1, 42 percent of publishers studied are missing out on up to $50k in annual ad revenue; 33 percent are missing out on up to $250k in annual ad revenue and 25 percent are missing out on more than $250k in annual ad revenue from off-site content.

Want to find out your TrueAudience™?

It’s very simple (and free).  Fill out a short form. One of our team members will contact you for your RSS feed and a list of licensees after which Attributor does all the work. You can expect to receive your free report in about a week.

Just in time for tonight’s debates, our Web-wide tracking study shows that John McCain has pulled ahead online.  For the first time since we started tracking the campaign in mid July, McCain’s messages are  viewed by a larger audience than Obama.

Please see our posts here and here to review our previous findings.

Here are our key findings (through September 24th)

• Thanks to a huge post-convention bounce, McCain took the lead over Obama in overall web traffic for the first time. The online audience viewing McCain’s messages grew 61% faster than Obama’s since the conventions.

• Palin’s convention speech has been viewed by an estimated 18,000,000 online viewers.
• The economy is the most copied issue for both candidates.  Iraq has fallen out of McCain’s top 5 issues for the first time in the campaign.
• While Obama still leads in the blogosphere, his lead has shrunk nearly 43% since the conventions.

Download a .pdf copy of full study and updates on all the charts.   We’ve highlighted a few of  the most interesting below.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom: TV viewership follows the same pattern as views of online content.

Attributor says . . . False

While TV is still king in terms of total audience, the web is substantial and shows different results.  Online, the McCain and Palin speeches combined attracted an additional 35 million views of the speech text after the convention.  Palin’s speech alone garnered almost 20 million versus Obama’s 11 million.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online. 

Attributor says . . . False  For the first time, McCain has surpassed Obama online.

McCain’s huge boost from his and Palin’s convention speeches now place him above Obama.   Since the convention, McCain’s online audience grew 61% faster than Obama’s.

Conventional Wisdom: Americans discount negative campaigning as “politics” and don’t pay much attention to it.

Attributor says . . . False

The rapidly increasing online negative campaigning on McCain’s behalf is paying off. People are reading the attacks- and in significant numbers. In September, almost 5 million people viewed attacks on Obama, compared to the roughly 3 million people who viewed attacks on McCain- almost 2:1

Download a .pdf copy of the latest study.

Tracking the war of words between John McCain and Barack Obama enables us for the first time to measure which messages are picked up the most across the Web and which position statements are attracting the largest audiences.

Please see our previous post to review our methodology, and you can see TechCrunch coverage here. Download a .pdf copy of the full study.

Key Findings (through August 24th)

• Obama’s messages continue to draw a larger online audience, but McCain closed the gap by almost 10% in the last two weeks. Obama’s messages received an estimated 38 million page views, compared to 36 million for McCain. Two factors appear to be driving McCain’s comeback.

1. McCain surged in the blogosphere which has been an area of Obama’s strength. Almost 350 new bloggers picked up McCain’s message, a 30% advantage over Obama. This translated into a 2:1 blog page view advantage across U.S. visitors over the last two weeks and ate into Obama’s overall audience lead in blogs.
2. McCain’s negative campaigning appears to be paying off. Obama attacks received an estimated 2.8 Million page views August-to-date – almost 3x as many as attacks on McCain over the same time period.

• Despite allegations of media favoritism, McCain’s words are featured 80% more often on news sites than Obama’s. McCain beats Obama by almost 3 to 1 on the major networks’ websites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN).

• McCain’s messages continue to be picked up more from his position statements (55%) than his speeches (45%) Obama’s messages are picked up more often through his speeches (67%) than his position statements (33%).

• Each candidate’s position on the economy is now the most widely read across the web with Obama’s Economic position leap-frogging his Iraq policy for the first time.

• In just 3 weeks, Obama’s Berlin speech has gone viral and has been viewed an estimated 2 million times – off of Obama’s official site.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom Conventional Wisdom: The news media is in love with Barack Obama and gives his messages a disproportionate amount of coverage.

Attributor says . . . False

McCain continues to trounce Obama on major news site coverage. He’s out-matching Obama almost 3 to 1 on the major networks’ websites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN). When local and national newspaper and magazine websites are factored in, McCain still outdoes Obama almost 2 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama and McCain are attacking each other with negative messages at the same rate.

Attributor says . . . False

Within the last two weeks, criticism of Obama has surged with his words being attacked more than twice as much as McCain. An “attack match represents an issue or speech that is matched on a site known to be unfriendly to the candidate. We matched McCain against the 50 most trafficked liberal sites and Obama against the 50 most trafficked conservative sites to get these numbers.

Conventional Wisdom: Americans discount negative campaigning as “politics” and don’t pay much attention to it.

Attributor says . . . False

The increased negative campaigning on McCain’s behalf appears to be paying off. Americans are reading the attacks in significant numbers. Month-to-date, there were an estimate 2.8M views of attacks on Obama compared to 1.1M views of attacks on McCain.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online.

Attributor says . . .True – but it’s getting much closer

Obama’s speeches and position statements continue to attract a larger online audience due to his strength in the blogsosphere. McCain’s recent gains in blogs are aiding his comeback and likely aligned with his more aggressive online blog tactics.

Please see our previous post to review our methodology. Download a .pdf copy of the full study.