Logically, publishers are hunkering down and looking for ways to incrementally boost the audience and cpms from their own sites.

We can help you achieve revenue growth by tapping into the audience that is already viewing your virally syndicated articles on other sites.   For the first time, publishers can quantify their off-site audience and, by identifying how your content is monetized,  access an incremental revenue stream that averaged over $150,000 annually for each publisher in our study.

See below for our key findings - for a full copy of the study including FAQs on the methodology, please download the .pdf

What we did:

• Loaded the full feeds from over 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories.
• Found web-wide reuse across 30 Billion pages during Sept. ‘08, discarding identifiable licensed copies.
• Eliminated any pages in which the reuse was less than 50% and less than 125 words of the original article.
• Calculated the off-site page view opportunity using estimate data provided by Compete.com.
• Calculated the audience multiplier for each publisher site and for 10 top categories.  This is the audience opportunity. expressed as a multiple of the page views on the destination site.

What we found:

• Across all sites in the study, publishers have an untapped off-site audience that is nearly 1.5 times the size of the audience that visits their destination site
• While each category has incremental opportunity, the auto and travel content categories have the largest off-site audience.
• Using a cpm of $1, 42 percent of publishers studied are missing out on up to $50k in annual ad revenue; 33 percent are missing out on up to $250k in annual ad revenue and 25 percent are missing out on more than $250k in annual ad revenue from off-site content.

Want to find out your TrueAudience™?

It’s very simple (and free).  Fill out a short form. One of our team members will contact you for your RSS feed and a list of licensees after which Attributor does all the work. You can expect to receive your free report in about a week.

Please see our posts here and here to review our previous findings.

Here are our key findings (through September 24th)

• Thanks to a huge post-convention bounce, McCain took the lead over Obama in overall web traffic for the first time. The online audience viewing McCain’s messages grew 61% faster than Obama’s since the conventions.

• Palin’s convention speech has been viewed by an estimated 18,000,000 online viewers.
• The economy is the most copied issue for both candidates.  Iraq has fallen out of McCain’s top 5 issues for the first time in the campaign.
• While Obama still leads in the blogosphere, his lead has shrunk nearly 43% since the conventions.

Download a .pdf copy of full study and updates on all the charts.   We’ve highlighted a few of  the most interesting below.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom: TV viewership follows the same pattern as views of online content.

Attributor says . . . False

While TV is still king in terms of total audience, the web is substantial and shows different results.  Online, the McCain and Palin speeches combined attracted an additional 35 million views of the speech text after the convention.  Palin’s speech alone garnered almost 20 million versus Obama’s 11 million.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online. 

Attributor says . . . False  For the first time, McCain has surpassed Obama online.

McCain’s huge boost from his and Palin’s convention speeches now place him above Obama.   Since the convention, McCain’s online audience grew 61% faster than Obama’s.

Conventional Wisdom: Americans discount negative campaigning as “politics” and don’t pay much attention to it.

Attributor says . . . False

The rapidly increasing online negative campaigning on McCain’s behalf is paying off. People are reading the attacks- and in significant numbers. In September, almost 5 million people viewed attacks on Obama, compared to the roughly 3 million people who viewed attacks on McCain- almost 2:1

Download a .pdf copy of the latest study.

Please see our previous post to review our methodology, and you can see TechCrunch coverage here. Download a .pdf copy of the full study.

Key Findings (through August 24th)

• Obama’s messages continue to draw a larger online audience, but McCain closed the gap by almost 10% in the last two weeks. Obama’s messages received an estimated 38 million page views, compared to 36 million for McCain. Two factors appear to be driving McCain’s comeback.

1. McCain surged in the blogosphere which has been an area of Obama’s strength. Almost 350 new bloggers picked up McCain’s message, a 30% advantage over Obama. This translated into a 2:1 blog page view advantage across U.S. visitors over the last two weeks and ate into Obama’s overall audience lead in blogs.
2. McCain’s negative campaigning appears to be paying off. Obama attacks received an estimated 2.8 Million page views August-to-date – almost 3x as many as attacks on McCain over the same time period.

• Despite allegations of media favoritism, McCain’s words are featured 80% more often on news sites than Obama’s. McCain beats Obama by almost 3 to 1 on the major networks’ websites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN).

• McCain’s messages continue to be picked up more from his position statements (55%) than his speeches (45%) Obama’s messages are picked up more often through his speeches (67%) than his position statements (33%).

• Each candidate’s position on the economy is now the most widely read across the web with Obama’s Economic position leap-frogging his Iraq policy for the first time.

• In just 3 weeks, Obama’s Berlin speech has gone viral and has been viewed an estimated 2 million times - off of Obama’s official site.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom Conventional Wisdom: The news media is in love with Barack Obama and gives his messages a disproportionate amount of coverage.

Attributor says . . . False

McCain continues to trounce Obama on major news site coverage. He’s out-matching Obama almost 3 to 1 on the major networks’ websites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN). When local and national newspaper and magazine websites are factored in, McCain still outdoes Obama almost 2 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama and McCain are attacking each other with negative messages at the same rate.

Attributor says . . . False

Within the last two weeks, criticism of Obama has surged with his words being attacked more than twice as much as McCain. An “attack match represents an issue or speech that is matched on a site known to be unfriendly to the candidate. We matched McCain against the 50 most trafficked liberal sites and Obama against the 50 most trafficked conservative sites to get these numbers.

Conventional Wisdom: Americans discount negative campaigning as “politics” and don’t pay much attention to it.

Attributor says . . . False

The increased negative campaigning on McCain’s behalf appears to be paying off. Americans are reading the attacks in significant numbers. Month-to-date, there were an estimate 2.8M views of attacks on Obama compared to 1.1M views of attacks on McCain.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online.

Attributor says . . .True - but it’s getting much closer

Obama’s speeches and position statements continue to attract a larger online audience due to his strength in the blogsosphere. McCain’s recent gains in blogs are aiding his comeback and likely aligned with his more aggressive online blog tactics.

Please see our previous post to review our methodology. Download a .pdf copy of the full study.

This is the first of a series of regular insights Attributor will be sharing on the election between now and November 4^th. Download a .pdf of the full study here.

What we did:

• Used the Attributor platform to capture each candidate’s key issues and speeches as stated on their official web sites: www.johnmccain.com and www.barackobama.com.

• Tracked the distribution of each candidate’s words across 25 Billion+ pages, including blogs and social networks, looking for unique web pages containing matches of their speeches and official position statements.

• Analyzed and categorized the individual sites and pages containing the candidates’ messages.

• Using Attributor’s Audience Finder™ Technology, estimated the reach of each candidate’s messages across the Internet.

Key Findings:

• McCain is holding his own online. The overall audience viewing each candidate’s message was virtually the same with each totaling over 65 Million page views.

• McCain’s campaign messages are more likely to be picked up from his position statements (64%) than his speeches (36%) Obama’s messages are picked up more often through his speeches (71%) than his position statements (29%)

• Despite allegations of media favoritism, McCain’s words are featured 112% more often on news sites than Obama’s. In July there were over 20 Million views of McCain’s messages on news sites.

• Obama is dominating the blogosphere with over 12 Million views of his messages occurring on blogs in July. Twice as many bloggers repeat his messages than those of McCain. Obama owns a similar advantage on social networking sites like Face book and MySpace.

True or False? Attributor Investigates Election 2008’s Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom: The news media is in love with Barack Obama and gives his messages a disproportionate amount of coverage.

Attributor says . . . False

Perhaps this is true when it comes to television or print. But when it comes to coverage of each candidate’s position statements or speeches, McCain is trouncing Obama. His lead on major network web sites (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN) is almost 4 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s youthful support translates into higher support across social networks.

Attributor says . . . True

Across social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, Obama’s messages are picked up by more than 2 to 1.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s grassroots efforts have resulted in a substantial lead across the blogosphere.

Attributor says . . . True

Obama has an 86% edge in bloggers who incorporate his messages into blog posts. Obama’s Berlin speech fueled a 10% jump in commentary across the Blogosphere.

Conventional Wisdom: Obama’s message is best delivered through speeches, while McCain’s strength is with his position on issues.

Attributor says . . . True

Obama’s speeches are being picked up on the Web much more than his position statements. The opposite is true for McCain.

Conventional Wisdom: By virtue of his appeal to a younger demographic, Obama is reaching a larger audience online.

Attributor says . . . False - it’s virtually a dead heat.

Our Audience Finder technology shows that Obama’s advantage across the blogs and social media give him a slight advantage over McCain overall. McCain is staying close via his reach on traditional news sites.

In July, Obama’s messages reached slightly over 65 million page views whereas McCain’s estimated page views were just short of 65 million.

Obama’s reach across the blogosphere was more than double than McCain’s in July.

McCain enjoyed an 86% reach advantage on Web sites in July.

Stay tuned for regular insights on the 2008 Election from the Attributor blog.

We’ve done everything but open it up to SEOs . . . until now!

We’re excited to announce a free beta test of Attributor for SEOs looking to build links. Find more information and sign up here. To save a trip to our FAQ, here are some answers.

Is it really free?
Yes, no cost to you. All we want is your feedback.

Why are you opening this up to SEOs?
We believe in the link economy and can’t think of a better group to help us improve our service.

Does Attributor guarantee links?
No and anyone using our service to obtain paid links will be politely asked to leave. What Attributor will do is automate your backlink prospecting and track your success.

Do you only find PR7 and above sites?
We wish. Last month, Attributor identified 25,000 link opportunities with a PR5 or better. With your help, we’ll improve this number and deliver the right link candidates for you.

Is your vision to be a SEO service?
Our customers consist of many large publishers including folks who are using us for Link Building. We will soon be providing services for all types and sizes of publishers, including bloggers.

What are you waiting for? Go get some links.

While I agree with the ultimate conclusion that waiting for Scoble or Mashable links is a flawed strategy, Louis’s statement of links being less important is way off-base. Links are an online currency and a key driver of your search engine ranking - a statement backed up by experts such as Debra Mastaler and Jeff Jarvis - and no one can claim that search traffic’s importance.

If Louis is like other top blog sites we’ve analyzed, he’s missing a huge link and traffic opportunity. In the month of June, we loaded the publicly available RSS feeds for several top blog sites into our service to analyze how much re-use was occurring, and more importantly for this discussion, the percentage of re-use that did not link back.

As you can see from the figure below, many of the top blog sites are leaving (link) money on the table.

Louis (and anyone else), let us help you increase your blog link traffic by giving you a web-wide view of your link opportunities and the tools to secure them.

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.

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.

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 ?

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?