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.

The buzz around ad networks and ad serving technologies couldn’t be louder: The Google/DoubleClick merger is moving forward, new ad exchanges continue to pop up on a monthly basis, and just last week Forbes and ESPN followed Martha Stewart’s lead to start their own ad network.

Last week’s actions prove that publishers want a piece of the online advertising pie. After analyzing content monetization across 68 million domains, it’s clear that publishers have a huge opportunity to collect revenue directly from ad networks. (If you are like me and need a refresher on the difference between an Ad Server and an Ad Network, there is a good description here .)

What we did:

We analyzed the ad-server calls across 68 million domains captured from our January, 2008 crawling operations. The data was joined with January, 2008 unique user data from our friends at Compete to determine market share numbers.

What we found:

• DoubleClick and Google dominate overall market share capturing 35% and 34% of unique users, respectively.
• DoubleClick owns the head and Google owns the tail. For sites with over 1MM monthly unique users, Doubleclick has a 48% share, a 3x advantage over 2nd place Yahoo. For sites with less than 100k monthly unique users, Google has an 8x share advantage over 2nd place MSN.
• Professionally produced content is widely proliferated across highly trafficked, commercial sites, representing an untapped opportunity for publishers to increase their revenue through content licensing, ad revenue share or link-building.

Conclusions:

• The GoogleClick combination is an ad-serving juggernaut. They should be at the top of your call list to collect a % off of every ad dollar made off your content.

• Content is proliferating all over the place - Attributor finds an average of 20 different copies for each article we track.

• There is a lot of money at stake. 64% of the copies have ads on their pages and most republishing is on sites with > 1MM monthly unique users.

• It’s an SEO goldmine. 57% of the copies we find do not link back to the original sites.

Stay tuned for regular reports on the pace at which articles, images and videos are spreading across the web and implications for the online content economy.

Methodology notes: This report represents a snapshot of ad server distribution in January, 2008 across 68 million domains Less than 5% of the domains contained more than one ad server call – in these cases, the traffic for the domain was associated with each ad network found. We did not attempt to de-duplicate the unique user numbers.

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.

Internet trends come and go but creating unique content has always been a key component of a successful online strategy. Back in 2000, it was all about the 3 C’s: Content, Community and Commerce. Fast forward to 2008 and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick declares that banner advertising is dying and companies should treat their content as advertising.

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.

The friendly folks from HyveUp visited us last week as part of their mission to offer video interviews of all the Web 2.0 startups.

It used to be when someone reused your work online without permission, you had two options. You could ignore them or lawyer up.

While the debate over the fairness of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rages on, sending DMCA takedown notices is the standard practice – a practice that is not only out of date, but it also prevents the online content economy from reaching its potential.

For all but the most egregious cases, we’d like to suggest an alternative: Link Requests. Link Requests are notices sent to a web site re-using your work without giving you attribution. The notice asks for a link back to the site where your work was originally published. Attributor can monitor whether the link was added and report back to you.

Here are 10 reasons why Link Requests should become the new standard practice.

10. More Direct Traffic. Every link that points back to your site will result in more traffic to your site. Think of it as an affiliate program for your content – only you don’t have to pay for the clickthroughs.

9. No one wins when a DMCA notice is sent. First, unless you have an open and shut case, a DMCA notice can be a PR risk for the DMCA sender. Next, the site hosting the content has to deliver the bad news to its user putting them in an unfavorable spot. Finally, consumers lose overall because the result of content removal is one less place to find quality content.

8. Except Lawyers.

7. More Search Engine Traffic. Inbound links are the backbone on which your search engine rankings are built. If you get more links, your search engine rankings will improve. And no dodgy SEO tactics are required – you just make sure that all copies of your content link back to your site.

6. Freedom to Put Your Best Content Online. With the ability to harvest value from all copies of your content, you will no longer need to hold back your best stuff.

5. More Brand Awareness. Over 120,000 new blogs are created every day. By allowing your content to proliferate through this rapid growth channel, you extend your content’s reach exponentially.

4. The Link is Mightier than the Take-Down Notice. While it’s true that reusing text, images or videos without permission is basically theft, sending takedown notices to blogging moms won’t win you any new customers.

3. Fair Use is Debatable – Attribution is Not. You can’t send a DMCA notice if it’s Fair Use – and Fair Use is usually not a black and white situation. The fairness of asking for a link is indisputable.

2. Enter the Social Media Arena. You don’t need to take chances on viral videos taking off every quarter; instead, allow your linked content to proliferate – it’s your best asset.

1. Links are Currency in the Google Economy. If Marcus Aurelius were alive, he would say “A man’s worth is no greater than his inbound links” . . . and he’d be right. You’ve already earned the right to rank highly in search engines. Securing links guarantees your credit.

But don’t take our word for this – just read how smart publishers like CondéNet are recognizing that content proliferation is a strategic exercise. Executing this strategy is now possible by gaining web wide visibility of how and where your articles, images or videos appear. Link Requests are the new standard response to your content being copied.

What do you think? What other ideas do you have to resolve the current impasse?

If you’re a celebrity, having your image copied across the web may be a good thing – people are talking about you and reinforcing this conversation with an image that, in most cases, puts you in a flattering context. So we thought it would be fun to look at celebrity images as a means to showcase Attributor’s web-wide monitoring capabilities and the opportunities this visibility uncovers.

This study does not attempt to make light of the issues that photographers face when confronted with unauthorized use of their work – if Lane Hartwell’s images are proliferating at even a fraction of the rate of the images on Maxim’s, FHM’s and People’s hot lists, there is an obvious impact on her business.

What we did

Attributor’s image monitoring platform scanned the web to find copies of images from two female celebrity lists, Maxim’s “2007 Hot 100” and FHM’s “100 Sexiest Women 2007″ and two male celebrity lists totaled People’s “Hottest Bachelors 2007″ and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive 2007″. The four lists totaled slightly over 220 images.

Attributor found 2,547 copies of the images across the web.

Problem or Opportunity?

There is plenty of evidence to suggest an untapped opportunity for publishers. The facts:

Are the copying sites commercial? Yes, a whopping 73% of the copying sites had ads on their pages.

How much traffic did these sites receive? According to our friends at Compete.com, about a third of the sites containing copies of the images were visited by more than 50k people in December, 2007.

Are any of the copying sites linking back to the original site? Very few – only 13% of the copies found linked back to the original or related celebrity site.

How do copies of the images rank in search engines? Very high. In fact, of the top 10 females, a copy outranked the original image in Google search results 100% of the time.

Implications for Publishers and Content Creators

Opportunities abound to harness value from your content as it leaves your site.

1. First, incremental revenue through new licenses of commercial image usage is available and ready for the taking. With web-wide visibility, finding new leads and billing existing licensees gets a lot easier.

2. Securing links to drive increased traffic is another untapped opportunity. Link building is the backbone of SEO best practices – using Attributor, you can now increase traffic on their destination sites by securing links.

3. Lastly, the findings are another reminder of images’ viral potential, waiting to be propelled by new viral content strategies. Implementing, measuring and optimizing these strategies requires web-wide, contextual visibility of where your content appears.

For a view on the lighter side of the findings, read Attributor’s 2007 Hottest Internet Celebrities.

And the award goes to…Megan Fox! Best known for her heroics against the Decepticons in the movie Transformers, Megan Fox had the most copied celebrity image on the Web out of all the images of the women on Maxim’s “2007 Hot 100” and FHM’s “100 Sexiest Women 2007”, despite her official ranking of 18^th and 65^th on those lists, respectively.

Here’s what we did:

• First, we found lists of the hottest women in 2007 from FHM and Maxim, and lists of the hottest men in 2007 from People’s “Hottest Bachelors 2007” and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive 2007”
• Next, we used Attributor’s image monitoring platform to scan the web for copies of the images.
• Finally, we reviewed the results, tallied the number of times each image was copied, painfully sorted through thousands of pictures of beautiful women, and categorized the type of site doing the copying.

The Results:

The top five most copied female celebrity images on web with the FHM and Maxim rankings shown in parentheses are:

1. Megan Fox (65,18)
2. Jessica Alba (1,2)
3. Rihanna (Not Ranked, 8 )
4. Halle Barry (16, 55)
5. Lindsay Lohan (41, 1)

Let’s not forget the men. Matt Damon will undoubtedly be pleased that he led the list of the most copied male celebrity images across both the People “Sexiest Man Alive 2007” and “Hottest Bachelors 2007” lists. His married status did not dampen Web user’s enthusiasm for his photo at all. Bachelor Matthew McConaughey, the cover photo for the “Hottest Bachelors” list, made a respectable runner-up rank in terms of his well-copied image.

The top five most copied male celebrity images from both People lists with official magazine rankings in parentheses are:

1. Matt Damon
2. Matthew McConaughey
3. Patrick Dempsey
4. James McAvoy
5. Jake Gyllenhaal

And where are these images being used most? You guessed it. Gossip sites - they represent 36% of all sites found as publishing your own gossip site appears to be the new black. Here’s a breakdown of the sites where we found the images

• Gossip Sites 36%
• Movie sites: 15%
• Fan sites: 7%
• Recognized domains that appear to be licensing the images: 7%
• Splogs: 2%
• Other 33% (Personal homepages/blogs, non-english sites)

For a more rigorous breakdown and analysis of the meaning of these results, read Attributor’s “The Untapped Potential of Celebrity Images”

Megan Fox image courtesy of Maxim, Matt Damon image courtesy of People Magazine

Every month, a group suggests a new thesis to enable online content proliferation and strike a balance between the needs of consumers and publishers alike. Predictably, the output is a set of guidelines or call for new guidelines, as the Center for Social Media reported today. Though well-intentioned, more guidelines are not the answer; instead, participatory media will thrive through a community that is empowered by full visibility of online video re-use and publisher web distribution policies.

Determining ‘Fair Use’ is a tough, complex problem – an issue that has caused many media companies and individuals to shy away from embracing the Internet as a distribution channel. “Recut, Reframe and Recycle” the report from the Center of Social Media out of American University examines user-generated video content and classifies usage into nine common practices that appear to be ‘Fair Use’.

Media companies and artists like Lane Hartwell have long since thrown up their hands in trying to determine which instances of re-use to allow among the thousands of copies that appear on the Internet each week. The barriers are substantial:

• The tools to locate re-use of images or video content are limited.
• Reviewing each and every copy found is burdensome.
• Contacting each site to pursue a licensing deal isn’t feasible especially without some type of filter to identify which ones can result in a new revenue source.

Visibility is the answer, and, by this, I don’t just mean a long list of the sites re-using videos across the Internet, sorted by monthly visitor traffic. This won’t help with the nine common classes of ‘Fair Use’ introduced today and will bury most publishers under an avalanche of work.

Publishers of all sizes, and specifically video producers should be able to classify each video as “Promotional” or “Premium” assigning each a set of parameters that specify the maximum duration it can be shown, the branding and link requirements plus any ad-sharing splits.

With contextual, web-wide visibility of re-use, publishers of all sizes can post their distribution policies for the community to embrace. Any mashup less than 30 seconds can be greenlighted as long as a link is provided or full copying of premium videos can be enabled as long as 40% of all ad revenue is directed to the publisher’s AdSense account.

The complexities and possibilities of what can be created are endless, but all seem like a giant step forward.

Lane Hartwell’s decision to make her Flickr stream private has spawned a passionate reaction from Robert Scoble and an analytical response from Mark Hopkins. It’s a great illustration of the dilemma that publishers of all sizes face when they learn how widely their content is being re-used.

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.