On Friday, we found a site containing the first 10 chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This seemed like a better example of infringement than the previously analyzed spoiler page, so we plugged the chapters into Attributor and checked the results at midnight Sunday night.

Here are our findings:

• 2,806 sites lifted the book content
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 54% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 27% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 19% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter text copied is ~71%
• Over 80% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 43 different countries.

By all accounts sales of the book are phenomenal, and judging by an informal Attributor office poll, the impact on the first weekend’s sales appears to be zilch.

That said significant portions of the book continue to pop up all over the web making the downstream impact of the duplication unknown.

One thing for certain– the hysteria over the book’s release has filled many sploggers pockets. We just hope they repaid Scholastic by buying a few copies of the book!

August 1st Update

After reading about the Spanish spoiler’s release via TechCrunch, we loaded the 1st 10 Spanish chapters of the book into Attributor.

Here are our findings:

• 440 sites lifted the book content in Spanish
• Duplication by type of site breaks down as follows
• 48% Splogs or other commercial sites
• 40% Forums/Blogs (other than Harry Potter fan sites)
• 12% Harry Potter fan sites
• Across all sites, the percentage of full chapter Sapnish text copied is 60%
• Over 85% of the sites duplicating the content have ads on their pages
• Sites duplicating the book are based in 11 different countries.

The increase in splog site duplication is further proof of how easy it is to monetize popular search terms using Adsense or Yahoo Search Marketing text links.

This is the first of a series of analyses we’ll be sharing in the coming months. We hope to provide insights on how the content economy works and how it could be better managed with web-wide visibility and accountability.