By Frédéric Filloux
mondaynote.com
An excerpt from this February 14th post follows:
For publishers: How much money is lost because of stolen contents? Of that, how much can be realistically reclaimed? . . .
How important is this stolen content? “For newspapers and the three main wire agencies, the net present value of stolen content is about $250m on the American market alone”, says Jim Pitkow whom I met last week in Paris. To come up with such estimates, Attributor counts the advertising associated with the infringing content and multiplies it by the CPM (cost per thousand) and the audience of the site. Last December, Attributor released a study that showed for the first time the extent of the illegal reuse of news material.
The study covered a corpus of 100,000 articles from 157 American newspapers monitored for one month. Here are the key findings:
– 112,000 unlicensed, full copies of US newspapers articles were found on more than 75,000 sites across the internet. Full copy means more than 80% of illegal reproduction of the original article.
– If we extent the notion of copy to excerpts (i.e.: less than 80% of the original story but more than 125 words — roughly half a typewritten page), we add 163,000 more references.
– On average, an article is illegally reused 4.4 times, whole or in part; but for large national papers reuse can go up to 15 times per story!
– On the money side, not surprisingly, Google captures 53% of the value that is unrealized by publishers; next is Yahoo (19%); Microsoft (5%); scientific sites (5%); AOL (3%); the rest is atomized. Bloggers represents only 10%.
Books are not spared. Again according to another research project conducted by Attributor, online book piracy represents about 10% of total book sales in the US. The most stolen genres are business and investing books with an average of 13,000 downloads per title, followed by professional and science titles. On these categories, Attributor found out that each title was losing over $1m to online piracy! . . READ FULL STORY
