Report Identifies Extensive Unlicensed U.S. Newspaper Content Reuse and Monetization Online

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - December 1, 2009) - The Fair Syndication Consortium, which includes more than 1,500 publishers and 75 percent of top U.S. newspaper publishers, announced today the release of a research report on the proliferation of U.S. newspaper content, showing that over a 30-day period more than 75,000 unlicensed sites reused U.S. newspaper content online. On these sites, 112,000 near-exact copies of unlicensed articles were detected.

The report identified ad placement on Web pages where unlicensed content reuse was present and concluded that major ad network players Google and Yahoo together account for nearly three-quarters of total unlicensed newspaper content monetization. Microsoft, Audience Science, AOL and several other ad networks accounted for the remaining ad placement on reusing sites.

"The findings of the Fair Syndication Consortium research brief are significant as they prove that there is a large amount of unauthorized U.S. newspaper content reused online, and that reuse is monetized by major ad networks," said Randy Bennett, SVP of business development for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). "At the NAA, we're supporting new models for content monetization as we strongly believe that quality content produced by top journalists and news organizations should be compensated."

Key Findings:

--  During a 30-day period (October 15 - November 15, 2009), 75,195 Web
    sites reused at least one U.S. newspaper article without a license.
--  On these sites, 112,000 near-exact unlicensed copies of articles were
    found.
--  Among the top 1,000 sites reusing the most articles, blogs represent
    less than 10 percent of the total.
--  In addition to the 112,000 full article copies (defined as more than
    80 percent of the original article and more than 125 words reused), an
    additional 163,173 excerpts were found (defined as less than 80 percent of
    original article and more than 125 words).
--  Ad networks from Google and Yahoo dominate the unlicensed monetization
    of U.S. newspaper content. Google represents 53 percent of the total
    monetization with Yahoo accounting for 19 percent.
    

The Fair Syndication Consortium research report comes in advance of the Federal Trade Commission's workshop exploring how the Internet has affected journalism. For additional details, study methodology and access to the research report in its entirety, please visit the Fair Syndication Consortium site at www.fairsyndication.org.

About The Fair Syndication Consortium

The Fair Syndication Consortium is a group of more than 1,500 publishers that support an open and fair online content economy. Founded in April 2009 by Attributor Corporation, the Consortium is providing a new syndication model to fully compensate those who create valuable content while appropriately rewarding those who aggregate, republish and monetize it. In October 2009, the Consortium published the Fair Syndication Guidelines, which marked the first time any organization attempted to lay out recommendations for the text industry on content syndication. For more information on the Consortium or to download a free copy of the guidelines, visit: www.fairsyndication.org.

Contact Information: Contact information: Amy Neal LaunchSquad 415.625.8555 attributor(at)launchsquad(dot)com