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.