Attributor Meets With 25 Publishers: Now What?

By: Jennifer Saba Attributor, the latest company to announce a revenue-for-content strategy, held meetings on Thursday in New York with a group of 25 publishers. Some newspapers attended, including representatives from both the property and corporate level, Attributor CEO and co-founder Jim Pitkow said. He declined to name the newspapers involved or reveal details of the meeting other than to say it was a follow up on discussions held in January.

So what do we know?

This week, Attributor unveiled the Fair Syndication Consortium. It already has some public members including Politico, Reuters and Magazine Publishers of America.

The Redwood City, Calif. company provides content tracking technology for syndication management. The AP is a customer.

Pitkow explained there are three-levels of usage of original content: the aggregation of headlines, excerpting, and full-on re-use. To convince publishers that more sites are taking content in full from the creator, Attributor found that for every one visitor who reads content at the site it originates, another five see it fully elsewhere.

Attributor decided that the last level would be the best place to start the beat with the Consortium.

"It's pretty reasonable that if someone is taking full content, you should share in the financial transaction," Pitkow said.

As such, the Consortium plans to contact advertising networks who serve online ads against that swiped content and ask for a piece of the action. Attributor would then disperse the revenue to the appropriate publisher, acting as the middleman.

Pitkow explains that once a copyright owner alerts a source of illegal use -- whether that source is a Web site, a search engine, the company hosting the servers or an ad server company -- any safe harbor disappears. "The ad networks have to cooperate here," said Pitkow. "If they fail to do so the copyright holders can request those ads be removed."

For a big publisher to reap a meaningful share of advertising from sites that grab its content, those sites need to have meaningful advertising too. Pitkow said that a "very diverse mixture of sites" use full copy but declined to give a breakout.

Any content provider, including blogs, can take part in the Consortium. Pitkow said the idea is to give publishers a choice. "We don't presume the top publishers are going to move entirely to this model," he said. "We are just here to unlock inventory for these rights holders."