Web advertising networks – which include those run by Google, Yahoo and MSN – do a great job presenting advertisements that are highly relevant to the content on any web page.  The question is, how often does the revenue from those ads actually reach the folks who create and own the content?

Our recent study on music lyrics illustrates the magnitude of this issue very well. First some background – last April, Yahoo Music partnered with Gracenote and became the first site to publish “official” song lyrics. The USA Today reported that Yahoo shares with the copyright holders the revenue from the ads that will be displayed alongside the lyrics. Just last week, MTV and AOL announced that they would also promote official lyrics on their web sites.

Why so much attention to song lyrics? It all comes down to Search. According to an Ask.com study, the term “song lyrics” was the 6th most popular search query last year.

What we did:

• Loaded lyrics from the following 14 songs into Attributor in mid-September: Umbrella (Rihanna), Before He Cheats (Carrie Underwood), Big Girls Don’t Cry (Fergie), Bleed it Out (Linkin Park), Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston), You Can’t Stop the Beat (Hairspray Soundtrack), Can’t Tell Me Nothing (Kanye West), The Pretender (Foo Fighters), Stronger (Kanye West), Plies (Shawty), I Get Money (50 Cent), Let it Go (Keyshia Cole), Ayo Technology (50 Cent) and Good Life (Kanye West)
• The service then scanned billions of pages across the web to find copies of the songs
• For each song we compared the search engine ranking of Yahoo Music’s “official” version with the copies on Google and Yahoo search engines

What we found:

• 1524 nearly exact copies across 300 different sites
• 57% of the copies had ads on the pages
• None of the copies contained links back to the official version at Yahoo Music
• 100% of Google searches ranked the copying site higher than the official version when searching with terms for “Song + lyrics (e.g. “stronger lyrics”)
• 81% of Yahoo Searches ranked the copying site higher than the official version using the same search terms
• To view the entire study and find out how much more Kanye West’s new album was copied than 50 Cent’s new release, please download the .pdf

So what can newspapers, magazines and writers do to capture full value for their original content? The first step is understanding how and where your content is being copied. With this information, you can decide how to act through Attributor:

• Request a link back to your original improving your search engine ranking.
• Ask the site to deposit a % of the revenue they make from your content into your AdSense account.
• Send a formal DMCA takedown notice - we will ensure that it gets taken down from search engines.

Last week, Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms, told the American Magazine Conference, “Don’t fear Google”. With Google’s AdSense revenues surpassing $5 Billion a year, “Fear” is the wrong term. How about making Google and the other search engines accountable?