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