Earlier this summer, we asked for feedback in our customer satisfaction survey. One thing we heard clearly was, “Please help us find the really important sites.” Today, we’ve released the first of a series of improvements in response to this need.

1. Sites to Review . An algorithm-generated list of the match sites which really need your attention. The screen offers a number of workflow actions for each match site.
2. Watch List . One of the actions from the Sites to Review screen is to put a match site on the Watch List. Once the match site has been moved to the Watch List, you can review all of the matches on that match site in turn, and send remedies as desired.
3. Licensing Opportunities . Another action from the Sites to Review list is to add the match site to a list of potential licensees… and then hand that view over to the Sales team to give them the opportunity to generate new revenue.
4. User-controlled definition of Extensive Matches . The Extensive Matches metric is a important component of the Sites to Review workflow. You now have the ability to control the definition of an extensive match.
5. Workflow enhancements . To improve the Attributor workflow, we’ve moved some of the dashboards and match view filters into subsections of other areas of the service.

Read on for more details.

Sites to Review

Sites to Review is the new entry page on the Attributor text service and is designed to highlight the most important match sites to drive your daily workflow. It dynamically generates a list of high-interest match sites, based on a weighted view of several key match metrics.

When you are looking at a site in the Sites to Review page, consider all the factors — is this site making money off of my content? (Look for the $ icon). Is this site using a lot of my content? (# of matches, # Extensive Matches). Are they getting a lot of traffic, meaning that my content is being seen by a lot of people? Can I convert this site to a licensee and make money from their use of my content, either through sharing ad revenues or through a straight license deal, or do I need to send a takedown request based on the way they are using my content?

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

Watch List

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Once you’ve decided that a site on the Sites to Review page needs to be considered for a removal or other action, you can move the site to the Watch List. From the Watch List you can review each match on the domain in turn — or ignore the match.

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

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Once you’ve decided to Review for Removal, you’ve got some new options in the Match Details page:

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You can:

• Request a Link
  
• Offer a License
• Send a Removal
• New! Ignore the match (make it disappear from the list)
• New! Skip the match (It’s still there, you can come come back to it later).
  

Licensing Opportunities

From the Sites to Review List, one option is to add sites to the Licensing Opportunities list. This list is designed to present your Sales of Business Development team with a list of relevant sites that might make good partners or licensees. Instant return on your investment — here’s a list of sites that should be paying you for your content!

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

User Controlled Definition of Extensive Matches

Extensive Matches are the matches that we’ve found that use a significant portion of your source article and are an important factor in determining Sites to Review candidates. In this release, we allow users with the appropriate permission setting define the rules for what matches are considered extensive.

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Workflow enhancements

We’ve moved some of the pages around in the interface to make your daily workflow easier. Here are the changes:

• Dashboards have been moved. The All Matches Dashboard is under the Summary tab; the Licensed Dashboard is under the Licensing tab as the Licensee Summary, with a toggle to show Unlicensed Summary (Dashboard).

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• Remedy tracking dashboards have been moved from the Remedies tab to reside within their category tabs — for example, License Request tracking may be found under the Licensing Tab, and Takedown Requests may be found under the Removals tab.
• The All Matches table is under the Matches tab; Licensed and Unlicensed tables are under the Licensing tab.
• The Licensee List has been moved under the Licensing tab.

What’s Next!

We’re testing a handful of near-term improvements to the Attributor Text Service. Stay tuned for:

• Enhanced Match Duplication Removal . We’ve made significant progress on this issue to date; our next release focuses on clearing out the remaining duplicates.
  
• Blog Domain Separation . Right now, Blogspot, Wordpress, etc. show up as single domains, and it is difficult to see which blogs on these domains are reusing your content. Shortly, we will begin treating each of these bloggers as their own domain and you will be able to see individual blogs within Sites to Review.
  

We Want your Feedback

As always, we are interested in your input, particularly with the Sites to Review workflow. Did we get the altorithm right — are we showing you the match sites you want to see? If we are, please tell us; we like to know when we we hit the mark. If we are not, then we hope you will take a few moments and tell us why — it’s far more important, of course, for us to know if we didn’t get it right than if we did. Please send comments directly to me (david <at> attributor.com) or to feedback <at> attributor.com.

What could be better than having web-wide visibility of your content? How about if it was integrated into your company’s workflow? We’re proud to announce the availability of our Match API, the first of many initiatives designed to make Attributor data and insights more actionable for your organization.

Here are a few examples of what you can do with the current Match API:

• Plug the Match data into your CMS enabling your writers to see where their content is spreading across the blogosphere and social networks
• Automatically check the originality of your content before it gets published
• Join match data with your web analytics software to better understand the traffic each piece of content is driving back to your site

We’re eager for your input to drive what we build next. Some of the ideas include:

• Provide source and match summary data to easily integrate into your daily/weekly/monthly management reports
• Analyze licensee content usage across multiple dimensions on numerous 3rd party reporting packages
• Send all the urls containing your content directly to the ad networks and get your fair share of the revenue pie

Want to learn more about implementing the Match API? Have an opinion on what we should build next? Drop me a line at tj<at>attributor<dot>com

Since a large part of our matching activity involves following and analyzing content on various news sites, we tend to compare our progress with the industry standard — Google News. According to our analysis of Google news, Google follows some 7,000 English speaking sites world-wide as part of their News program.

During the last few months we were very active in adding high-quality, verifiable news sites to our crawlers, and we recently exceeded 10,000 English speaking news sites. This means we can legitimately say we have better News coverage than Google.

Due to the international nature of our customers, we will, over the course of next few months, begin expanding our news site coverage to include Spanish, French, German and Italian language sites. We hope to cover thousands of additional international, non-English sites by the end of the year.

In response to feedback from a number of our customers, the Attributor service has received a significant upgrade to the Dashboard, the Match Site Profile pages, and the sorting of matches under Current Matches. This new release is the culmination of a lot of work, and we’re very pleased with the changes; we hope you will be as well.

We’ve split the Dashboard up into four separate, contextually-driven sections, and added new metrics and new graphics that better show the spread of your content across the web, and how it’s being used by both your licensees and by those nefarious non-licensed sites. The objective here is to give you more actionable information for your Sales teams, and bubble up those sites that may require special attention from your Compliance folks. We’ve also added a page that shows new, relevant information for the Editorial team.

The Dashboard is now four separate screens. The first three screens build on the data we presented in the previous Dashboard, but with greater detail and with the ability to display match data based on Licensee status; the previous dashboard showed only Unlicensed match information. These changes will also extend to the Match Site Profile Page. Most importantly, we’ve included some important new metrics on these pages. These are:

• Number of match sites with ads
• Average matches per site
• Extensive & Ads chart (shows how many sites are using >50% of your source documents and making money off of them).

The new Matches dashboard

The fourth screen is an entirely new screen and comprises the original “Top Copied Sources” sub-screen from the original Dashboard plus new summary data for ingested sources and overall publishing status trends. Top Copied Sources can also now be displayed for 7 or 30 days of data. The new metrics on this screen are:

• Sources Copied – sources that have at least one match
• Average Matches per Source
• Average % Copied
• Average Words Copied

The new All Sources dashboard

The new release also brings in a new sorting feature for matches, both by domain and by source: Sort by Date. This allows you to sort by the Match Date or % Copied, as opposed to the previous hardwired % copied sort order.

Sort by date – available for both domain-level matches (shown) or source match lists

These changes have come in direct response to requests and feedback from our growing customer base. Your ideas drive our product. I’d like encourage you to send all your ideas, feedback, even criticisms, to me, every time something occurs to you. My job is to make sure that you get what you need from our services, and that includes making sure that your brilliant ideas get incorporated into the next (and next, and next) releases of our products. If you don’t have my email address, it’s david <at> attributor.com. I sit next to the Product Manager, and every idea you send, I immediately discuss it with him and the rest of the Product team, and then we batch them up for review by a larger team, and those ideas that we either can or feel we should execute on, get scheduled into the product roadmap. So, please keep the feedback coming!

-David