• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 24, 2008

Advertising networks will begin sharing ad revenue with publishers in 2009. Attributor, which published a study on the ad-serving market this week, will soon offer a service that lets customers monetize content.

Rich Pearson, VP of marketing at Attributor, said the Redwood City, Calif. company will rely on technology to automate the process. "We are working with Politico, but it hasn't been formally launched," he said.

Last week, Reuters--a division of global information company Thomson Reuters--said it will incorporate government and political news from Politico, a unit of Capital News, into its newswire service in a revenue-sharing deal. The group will allow Politico to sell online advertising on their sites. Ad code attached to the media content will determine the revenue-sharing agreement.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun announced a similar deal to share select stories, photos and news content, effective Jan. 1. No word on whether they will share ad revenue.

Attributor either will give publishers an option to either rely on ad tags to track content and automate payments, or keep track of where the content appeared across the Web and collect the revenue from the ad networks accordingly. The tracking service relies on server calls, which identify the moment a Web site requests an ad to serve up on the page.

The trend emerged from a study released in November that looks at how content proliferates and the revenue opportunities associated with the transaction. The study shows that readership rises on average 140% when the publisher's content posts on sites other than their own. These findings led Attributor to build the advertising syndication network service.

A related study released earlier this week allows Attributor to analyze the ad server calls across 75 million domains and determine from whom the publishers can collect ad revenue. Data came from Attributor's October 2008 crawling operation. DoubleClick and AdSense took responsibility for more than half of all online-ad-server calls-- 31% and 26% respectively, in November. The numbers include both display and text ads. Yahoo followed with 10%, AOL and Revenue Science, both at 7%. Microsoft, which owns ad-serving network Atlas, had 4% of market share.

The study looked at server share by vertical segments, too. Yahoo had 10% market share overall, but 14% in the health category. DoubleClick had 31% overall, but 58% in automotive. AdSense took 40% of market share for blog sites.

Since March, AdSense gained share on large sites, while Yahoo lost 4 points of market share on large sites, but maintained share on smaller sites. These market share numbers provide a roadmap for publishers looking to tap into the viral syndication of their content through a direct relationship with ad networks.