• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 1, 2009

"Hyper-distribution" was the catchword of 2008. Get your content out there, publishers were told, we'll monetize it later. It worked ... sort of. According to content tracking service Attributor, up to 5.3 times more people see a publisher's content away from its originating site. Thousands of blogs and aggregators simply reuse full copies of a publisher's articles on their own sites, and most of them are monetizing that content via three ad networks: DoubleClick, Google AdSense and Yahoo, Attributor also found.

At a meeting with major media in January, Attributor proposed that publishers work with ad networks to track their content and retrieve some of this lost revenue through revenue sharing and new monetization models. In one model, Attributor and a consortium of publishers would find instances where 90 percent of a publisher's original work was being re-used, identify the ad network on the page and claim a share of the revenue. In another model, a unified ad code would be put on a publisher's site or in its RSS feed so the publisher could push its own ad out wherever its content is re-published elsewhere. After meeting with 25 publishers, "we have 13 who have signed on to the consortium and three who are moving ahead with the unified ad code plan," says Rich Pearson, vice president of marketing at Attributor. Rather than issuing relentless take-down warnings and demands for money, he thinks answer involves active partnership rather than threat. "The knee-jerk reaction is 'By god, get me my money from Google,'" he says. "But we need to organize and have an industry-wide arrangement.