From our early video test results, it’s apparent that video ad relevancy is far from tuned. Hulu may have more monetizable traffic than YouTube, but our analysis indicates the contextual search advertising opportunity around embedded videos is virtually untapped.

Our initial crawling results show that nearly 30% of blog pages contain an embedded video. Over 50% of these pages had ads so we checked to see if the ads were relevant to the video content.

Not so much.

We sampled the embedded videos, and the results were eye-opening and often hilarious. Low-carb diet ads paired with Chevy Chase skits. Anti-wrinkle cream spots next to Paintball safety videos. Kelly Moore paints next to a Miley Cyrus dance-off.

The revenue per video must be abysmal on these examples. Multiply this opportunity by the tens of thousands like these that proliferate across the Web daily.

Perhaps this opportunity will finally bring AdSense and publishers closer together? In exchange for a share of all advertising revenue generated from their content, publishers can provide AdSense and others with an API containing the location of their embedded videos and associated meta data to increase the relevancy of ads. Increase the relevancy, increase the revenue. Expand the pie for everyone.

Online content syndication used to be a simple business. You chased licensing deals with the major U.S. portals, outsourced your reprint business and deflected any unauthorized re-use to your legal team for action. At renewal time, you were either in a ‘data-free zone’ with zero insight on licensee usage or you spent several painful weeks analyzing data that never quite gave you the right answer.

But everything has changed. You need a strategy to participate in the phenomenal growth of social networks and blogs. International growth is exploding - how can you quickly build a licensee lead pipeline? Finally, where can you find a scalable solution to keep track of the bad guys who continuously grab your articles without permission?

But where to start? Here are 8 practical tips to supercharge your content syndication business.

1. Create a content usage feedback loop. Without feedback on the specific articles and genres of content being used by your licensees, you are flying blind. Improve your product and your customers’ satisfaction by reviewing licensee usage in as much detail as you want.
2. Monitor actual usage vs license terms. How many articles do your licensees use every day? Are articles being used on multiple domains? Is usage compliant with the time period restrictions? Our customers tell us that as much as 30% additional revenue is there for the taking.
3. Get your licensees to link. A link back to your site will help your search engine positioning and signal to Google that your article is the original. More info at the Google Webmaster blog.
4. Give users a reason to click back to your site. If your monetization strategy depends on attracting visits back to your site, make sure that the amount of content included in your RSS feed is optimized. If I can read 100% of your content on several different blog sites why would I want to click?
5. Don’t miss the branding opportunity. Many RSS feeds make use of the format’s <image> sub element to enable your logo to be displayed along with your article to achieve greater brand exposure.
6. Watch your search rank. Hundreds of thousands of sites exist for the sole purpose of re-using professionally-produced content to siphon off traffic and ad dollars. Take action to protect your revenue stream.
7. Participate in the long tail. It’s big, and it can be monetized. Your content is appearing all over social networks and blog. Using established licensing platforms like iCopyright and others, you can tap into long tail growth.
8. Implement usage based billing. With web-wide visibility of your content’s usage, you can open up new market segments with a more flexible pricing structure. Instead of all-or-nothing, you can create your own content-vending machine.

Content is still King and it’s an exciting time to be a syndicator. You just need the tools to make sure you are collecting value for every instance of your content across the Web.

YouTube’s 73% market share gives them plenty of room to experiment. And it’s not difficult to determine why Google has stripped the ability to watch videos directly in search results. To paraphrase a famous politician, “It’s the revenue, stupid.”

At YouTube’s scale, increasing your eCPM by a few pennies adds up, particularly when there is pressure to hit your quarterly numbers. When I was at Yahoo!, employees judged how the quarter was going by how soon paid advertisements replaced previously “internal-only” spots on the front page. You were foolish to plan a launch or critical initiative the last month of a quarter that relied on front page placements because the inventory just went away.

The question is – whose video is You Tube monetizing and, if it’s yours—or one derived from your video, are you sure that you are getting your fair share ?

Google’s rise at the expense of traditional media is well-documented, but I thought the conversation would benefit from a graph plotting Google’s stock growth vs the change in paid circulation rates of Newspapers and Magazines.

Sources: Magazine Publishers Association, Newspaper Association of America, Yahoo! Finance

This is by no means meant to be a scientific analysis and I’m not claiming that these are statistically correlated; instead, the graph offers yet another data point confirming that we are indeed living in Google’s world.

And we’re not the only ones saying this: Robin Farzad at Business Week opines against Google’s “too-free press”. Jim Cramer goes a step further by saying Google ” . . . doesn’t create content, it steals it, borrows it, shares it.”

Regardless of where stand on the Google spectrum, you can’t possibly thrive in Google’s world unless you are asking questions like:

• Are you monetizing every copy of your content that appears across the Web
• Which ad networks owe you a cut of the revenue they are making off your content ?
• Is your syndication pricing optimized for the head and the tail?
• Where does your original content rank in Search Engines vs those copying it?
• Which bloggers are most effective in driving traffic back to your site?

How are you going to thrive?

Jeff Jarvis paints a clear picture on how news publishers should implement a distributed content strategy. It’s smart stuff, but the options present dizzying implications for the rest of your business. Still, you don’t want to be the AOL of the Internet access business holding on to a increasingly small set of users until you are irrelevant in the category.

So, if you were CEO, what would you do?

• Would you implement full RSS feeds for all your content?

• Partner with a company like Pluck to integrate social media into your site?

• Tear down the subscription wall to reach your best content?

• Expand your licensing team to boost revenue?

• Make it easy for your readers to mash up and share your content?

Any one of these strategies can help you succeed online. But which one and how do you measure success?

Without Web-wide visibility of your content and the tools to implement and refine your strategy, you’ll be gambling at best.

I have a love/hate relationship with SEO.  I love its promise of getting traffic for “free.”  I hate that many SEO tactics resemble a Potter-esque “Defense Against the Dark Arts” lesson.  But now with our link-building platform, marketers can embrace SEO and accurately measure its success.

With evidence that search is now the primary navigation tool to reach branded content,  ignoring link-building - a critical component of any SEO strategy - puts your brand at serious risk.  If you produce high-quality content, you are sitting on an SEO gold mine. Your content is your greatest asset online and it’s time to use it to your advantage - Patrick Altoft at Blogstorm calls it a link building machine, and I couldn’t agree more.

The New York Times realized this last year when it removed its subscription content barrier and saw traffic from Google double. And recently, Sports Illustrated unleashed its 53-year old archive of articles and photos – all the words that Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of its images and videos. As John Squires, executive vice president of Time, Inc., told the New York Times “The real hidden value of this is what it does for search. The move quadruples the site’s volume.”

So what does all this mean to marketers? Think differently about your content assets and the value of links. Unleash your articles, images and videos and allow them to drive traffic back to your site. Track those that are linking back. Correct those instances that aren’t linking back and increase your traffic and brand awareness.

We often get asked, “Do you really find everything across the Web?” In the past, our response included phrases like “Google parity”, “We find the matches that matter” with reference to examples where customers like Reuters have gained business intelligence or new monetization opportunities.

Today, our crawling team published the following nugget: Attributor now crawls over 10,000 English speaking news sites – leapfrogging Google News, the industry standard.

Clearly Google has a different monetization objectives and customer set, but that is precisely the point: Everyone at Attributor is hell-bent on providing visibility of how, where and when your content is being re-used. The search engines are not.

Are we high-fiving each other? No, but our customers are happy to be find new content monetization opportunities every day. Having Web-wide visibility and the tools to shape your content distribution helps answer questions like

• Who is using my content that should be paying for it?
• How are my licensees using my content?
• Which top ranking blogs should be linking to my site?
• Who is stealing my content and ranking higher than me in search engines?
• What are my largest, untapped content syndication opportunities?

What questions do you need to answer?

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.