Attributor Quantifies Monetary Value of Off-Site Content Viewership Across the Web

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - November 13, 2008) - Attributor Corporation, provider of the world's first Web-wide content monitoring and programming platform, today released the first study ever to quantify the audience size and monetary value of original publisher content on other sites. The study shows, in detail, a huge and largely untapped opportunity for online publishers of all types and sizes.

The study tracked online content from more than 100 publishers in a broad range of categories, including entertainment, sports, technology, politics, health, travel and automotive, scanning for proliferation across 30 billion Web pages during the month of September. The results indicate that the average publisher is missing out on more than $150k per year driven by the audience viewing their articles on other sites. By embracing open syndication through direct relationships with ad networks, content publishers may find an answer for the challenging advertising market.

"The results of this study confirm what many publishers have always known -- their original content is powering significant revenue on other sites," said Jim Brock, CEO of Attributor. "We're working with dozens of branded publishers and leading ad networks to quantify the Web-wide audience and revenue opportunity and determine the policies by which publishers can receive a revenue share from viral syndication of their content."

Key Findings:

--  Across all sites studied, publishers have an untapped off-site
    audience that is nearly 1.5 times bigger than the audience that visits
    their destination site.
--  While each category has incremental opportunity, the automotive and
    travel categories have the most significant opportunity with views on other
    sites five to seven times higher than on publisher destination sites.
--  Based on a CPM of $1: 42 percent of publishers studied are missing out
    on up to $50k in annual ad revenue; 33 percent are missing out on up to
    $250k in annual ad revenue; and 25 percent are missing out on more than
    $250k in annual ad revenue from off-site content.
    

Attributor's TrueAudience™ technology determined the audience for the following top categories in the research study as a multiple of the audience viewing content on the destination site:

--  Auto -- nearly 7x
--  Travel -- more than 5x
--  Movie reviews -- nearly 5x
--  Entertainment -- nearly 4x
--  Sports, Technology -- more than 2x
--  Advice, Environment, Health -- nearly 2x
--  Politics -- nearly 1.5x
    

Research Methodology

Attributor tracked the complete RSS feeds from over 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories and found all instances of that content across 30 billion Web pages, discarding identifiable licensed copies and eliminating any pages in which the content was less than 50 percent original or included less than 125 words of the original article. Attributor calculated the page view opportunity using estimate data provided by Compete.com and calculated the off-site audience for each site and for the top content categories. To assess the advertising revenue opportunity, Attributor applied a $1 CPM. While the study spanned several categories and different publisher sizes, each publisher should expect unique results and can request their own report at www.attributor.com. For complete research study results and research FAQ, please see the full report.

About Attributor

Attributor is a privately held technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Its content tracking and programming platform enables publishers to build value with their content wherever it appears on the Internet. Formally launched in November of 2007, Attributor's customers include The Associated Press, Reuters, The Financial Times, Deutsche Presse Agentur and CondéNet, and represent a significant percentage of the world's professionally produced content, giving the company unprecedented visibility into the proliferation and monetization of original content across the Web. More information can be found online at http://www.attributor.com.

Contact Information: Media Contact: Amy Neal or Monica Miller 415.625.8555 attributor(at)launchsquad(dot)com