Last week, I had the pleasure to drive down to Redwood City for an interview with Rich Pearson, VP Marketing at Attributor. There is a really simple way to explain what Attributor does. First is a list of links:
The Link is Mightier than the Take Down Notice
Search Engine Visibility: Where do copies of your articles rank?
Attributor Grows Customer Base, Adds Sales Leadership
CondeNet Chooses Attributor to Maximize Value of Online Properties
Reuters Choses Attribtor to Protect Content
Attributor tracks content online to help publishers capitalize on the “viral” distribution of their content. The links above will take you to the pages where I’ve copied content to create the video interview about Attributor. This way, instead of fighting mills, publishers use their copied content to boost their link juice and rank higher on SERPs.
To do this, Attributor crawls the Web (18 billion pages) in near real time and rolls out a set of analytics about a publisher’s content: How many times the content was copied, where, the PR of that site, ad revenue generated on that page… Attributor then offers a range of services to enable publishers to efficiently act upon plagiarism of their content. How? Watch the video and let Rich Pearson do the talk.
Attributor can also see through videos to spot copied content (images and such), but Rich told me their positioning on this activity is not crystal-clear just yet. Rich also told me that Attributor was looking at targeting the long tail of the blogosphere by offering bloggers similar services to help them protect their content too.
Attributor is definitely on the right track. The company’s value proposition is one of the strongest I have heard so far in the Web 2.0 industry. Online content is doomed to be scattered and copied. Instead of being bullish about content’s rights, Attributor enables publishers to benefit from content plagiarism and grow their business this way.