The AP is again trying to blame bloggers for bringing about the downfall of the news business. In an article yesterday, AP reports the findings of a recent study by Attributor Corp. which claims that 1.5 times more people read pirated articles than legitimate articles, housed at their originating organization, or at a fully-licensed AP site.
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Attributor sees a Step Three: Profit! lining in that cloud:
However, the problem, flagged by copyright cop Attributor Corp., could turn into a golden opportunity if media companies figure out a way to mine advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories posted on blogs and other sites.
Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimates the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.
It’s an unscientific estimate, based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that aren’t owned by the copyright owners.
If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the opportunity for fleeced publishers. The Redwood City-based company already is working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor’s vice president of marketing.
The problem, aside from still not understanding the benefit of having thousands of blogs pointing to your content? The excerpt above counts as piracy for the benefit of the study.
Attributor’s study, conducted from Sept. 12 through Oct. 12, reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor’s current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.
Oops. Just upped the word count again.
If Attributor – and the AP – wanted to find actual piracy, they should look for whole-article lifting. That happens every day, and should be attacked and stopped.
But focusing only on the actual pirates wouldn’t get them to the big shocking number they want, to make their wrong-headed point, now would it?
championslacker says
November 14, 2008 at 5:31 pmInteresting post. To me, the question is not whether the whole article has been lifted, but rather, has enough of the article been lifted that I don't need to go to the original source anymore. 125 words, particularly the first 125 words, could be enough in many cases, maybe not in others.
Rich Pearson says
November 15, 2008 at 12:01 amHi Tim,
I ran the study and work at Attributor. You are absolutely right that there is a lot of whole article lifting going on – this made up a big portion of the dollars shown above.
A couple points of correction. No AP stories were used in the study – we took it from 105 medium to large publishers across a variety of categories (e.g. autos, finance, entertainment)
In looking at the distribution of the matches, there is a significant portion that is the entire article save a slight change to the intro.
There are a lot of details to work out on what qualifies for payment – intuitively, it seems like anything that takes enough where you don't have to click through to read the full story and view the original content creators' ads is virtually a full copy.
While it wasn't a focus of the study, 73% of the reuse in this study was on pages that did not link back. In case you haven't seen it, we are fully behind linking: http://www.attributor.com/blog/the-link-is-migh…
timwindsor says
November 15, 2008 at 10:21 amIf the percentage is that high of outright theft of content, wouldn't the simpler path be to shut down that theft? It seems to me that a site that's willing to steal content isn't about to participate in a licensing or ad-sharing program.
Rich Pearson says
November 15, 2008 at 11:15 amPerhaps, and I would say absolutely if it's a splog . . . but these sites typically only take a portion of the content.
One nuance on this is that we can look at how much of the page reusing the content is made up of reused content which could clarify things a bit.
Back to your question, if the agreement is between publishers and ad networks vs the specific site, then the willingness of the site is somewhat moot; instead, publishers (of all sizes) and ad networks need to come to agreement of what pages qualify for ad-sharing.
The uber point is that there are eyeballs and revenue out there. Playing whack-a-mole hasn't worked to-date; a better strategy is to open syndication where your content is set free (with some qualifications) and the content creator gets paid as it is distributed and monetized.
Greg Gershman says
November 17, 2008 at 1:24 pmIt'd be nice if there was some way for individuals to report copyright violations. I know of a few sites that enthusiastically violate copyright multiple times a day, and I'd love to rat them out.
Does something like this exist?
This is similar to what YouTube is doing with copyrighted songs and videos; working with the owners to increase their overall reach and advertisable media, letting the users generate the audience.
Greg Gershman says
November 17, 2008 at 3:24 pmIt'd be nice if there was some way for individuals to report copyright violations. I know of a few sites that enthusiastically violate copyright multiple times a day, and I'd love to rat them out.
Does something like this exist?
This is similar to what YouTube is doing with copyrighted songs and videos; working with the owners to increase their overall reach and advertisable media, letting the users generate the audience.
Greg Gershman says
November 17, 2008 at 8:24 pmIt'd be nice if there was some way for individuals to report copyright violations. I know of a few sites that enthusiastically violate copyright multiple times a day, and I'd love to rat them out.
Does something like this exist?
This is similar to what YouTube is doing with copyrighted songs and videos; working with the owners to increase their overall reach and advertisable media, letting the users generate the audience.