Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders

Tracking Your Content Across the Web

Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on January 26, 2008

Summary: If you would like to learn about a service that can fingerprint and track your content across the Web, this interview is for you. (Part 1 of 2).

Our guest today is Jim Brock who is the CEO of Attributor. His company is an Applications Service Provider (ASP) that can fingerprint your content and track its usage across the Web. Attributor constantly scans billions of Web pages to find copies of your content wherever it is being displayed.Every media company knows that its articles, songs, photos, and videos are being copied and spread across the Internet, but many don’t know what to do about it. For example, they may want to prevent some websites from posting it at all, whereas they may want to share in the ad revenues from others who are using it. Finally, they may merely want to insist that those who do use it, link back to the originating source so as to increase traffic at the creator’s website and raise his profile in search engines such as Google.

Attributor was founded in 2005 to provide a service that enables media companies to accomplish such objectives. As noted, it fingerprints and tracks the use of your content across billions of pages on the Web. It also makes it easy for you to notify websites that are using it to let them know whether you will permit continued use, ask for an ad revenue share, or merely require a link back to your own website.

In part one of this two-part interview Attributor’s CEO provides a PowerPoint presentation explaining how the service works and describes the multiple benefits to users. In part two we get into case studies and general questions and answers.

Phil’s Take. Increasingly content providers are discovering that the entire Web is the target platform for our creations. Merely keeping our content on a destination site will fail to get maximum exposure. Presently, many of us are focused on optimizing distribution. However, we’re ultimately going to want insure that the content gets attributed to us as the creators, as opposed to another external website that may choose to post it. In short, Inside Digital Media is not ready for Attributor, but big media companies may be.