Want to See How Much Sploggers Steal from Your Blog? FairShare from Attributor Will Help You Find Out

At this very moment at the Creative Commons Technology Summit in Cambridge Attributor is previewing a new free product for bloggers and various web publishers that is intended for everyone to see exactly who is stealing our content and how they use it to make money off our work.

Attributor is a company that works with various web publishers - big and small - to point them to places where people steal their content. The crawler finds your content republished elsewhere and analyzes it to see if you got a link back and if the content is monetized on the site it is found on with ads. In addition to helping you identify the thieves Attributor also offers handy tools to demand that your content is removed or at least a link back to your own site is added.

I spent some time last week on the phone with Attributor as they were generous enough to analyze Profy feed as they are looking to connect to bloggers and probably see how we react to their ideas and products. I was very curious as I know many bloggers would have been as we are invariably concerned with everything about our blogs stats so it is no wonder I wanted to see the results of such analysis a lot (the screenshots used here are from Attributor report for Profy).

As a rule web content is viewed more away from its author’s site than on the site itself so you should imagine the scope of the problem and the amount of money some publishers lose by ignoring the fact that their content is used elsewhere.

It was very interesting for me to watch what the product was capable of and see who was engaged the most in stealing my content (Social Median seemed to be the site viewed as the worst splogger by Attributor). The major revelation to me was that the post that was republished the most (without permission or a link back more than a hundred of times compared to the usual a few times per post) was the one that was very popular on Google News - so it looks like sploggers use Google News for their content a lot and I’m not sure if Google does something to prevent them from accessing content of Google News publishers with their crawlers as I have a feeling that they can be identified somehow.

FairShare introduced today by Attributor is a new product that is intended specifically for bloggers as it will offer a free service for anyone to be able to analyze our feeds and see how our content is stolen and where it is used. Today Attributor is starting to invite bloggers to apply for participation in the closed beta testing for the product so if you are as curious as I was you are invited to sign up for the beta to be let in when the service is ready for it. Alternatively you can also follow FairShare on Twitter to be updated on the news and learn how the product is progressing. Knowing how bloggers love hunting for sploggers everywhere we can I am quite sure that FairShare will have plenty of beta testers waiting to be let in.