Rich Pearson first mentioned the 5x stat to me in an interview on April 23, when, at least according to my notes, he didn’t bring up the $250 million or any other dollar figure. I think they prepared that for the Chicago meeting as a more dramatic way of illustrating the problem — even if it’s neither dramatic nor a problem. To Attributor’s credit, they’ve been pretty clear about how rough their estimates are: In the slides above, the first two of three outcomes in their “scenario analysis” are failures.

This post was written on June 5. What I found most puzzling about today’s Times story was its conflation of Attributor and the Fair Syndication Consortium. The former is running the latter, but even if the consortium is a flop, Attributor will still profit from the fees they already charge to track content usage across the web. So they’ve got a pretty sound business plan in all this, even if newspapers don’t. —Zach

If the 5-times figure is really talking about “people who see a headline and summary on Huffington Post” then it still sounds inflated but it might make a little more sense. But if that’s what we’re talking about then this doesn’t represent traffic (and dollars) that Attributor — which Rich Pearson says is focusing solely on full-content reuse — can win back for publishers.

And just to reiterate your point as I don’t think Marcus understood – the consortium is focused on helping publishers capture their fair share of *full copy* reuse, removing the fair use question.

Just look at WSJ, DOW, or just about any other paper. Even the Associated Press aggregates.

and lets not forget pesky things like fair use and illegal combine law (antitrust to US types).

My other concern is that they actually just estimated the lost ad revenue for the 25 most popular U.S. publishers and extrapolated from there. Of course they weighted for traffic and everything, but it’s my impression that splogs and other forms of full-content piracy are orders of magnitude more common among some of the big blogs like TechCrunch than any regional newspaper — that is, they are pirated at a rate disproportionate to their traffic. Even piracy of The New York Times seems far less common than piracy of, say, Gawker Media sites, likely because the Times doesn’t offer any full-content RSS feeds.

That’s just my anecdotal impression, but I did ask Pitkow for his lost-ad-revenue estimate of just the top 25 publishers. He said he wasn’t cleared to release that information, which is fair enough, but it would help clarify this issue. (Am I making sense here? I’m writing quickly on a cramped bus that smells faintly of garbage, and I can only barely see the screen of my laptop, so who knows!)

Now, Pitkow was kind enough to go over the $250 million figure with me several times, and he did acknowledge that it’s a very rough estimate. If it turned out that piracy is only really common among the top publishers, that wouldn’t defeat Attributor’s premise. It would just mean that the consortium would only be of real benefit to sites like TechCrunch, Gawker Media, and The Huffington Post. No problem there — unless, of course, you’re one of the newspaper companies they were pitching in Chicago.

Thanks, Rich, for diving in first with those clarifications. (For everyone else: Rich is VP of marketing at Attributor.)

And, Siva, I — and, more to the point, the consortium — are not talking about “legal online aggregation and linking.” The whole point of this post is to make that distinction. —Zach

For now, what aggregators do is legal and what newspaper publishers are proposing is illegal (collaborate on setting prices).

Please be careful.

As I’m sure your aware, this actually seems like a wildly aggressive CPM estimate for splog-like sites. I would be surprised if their CPMs were higher than a couple pennies.

Looking at what Attributor does, I’m not surprised by his math. The CEO has every incentive to exaggerate the cost of the problem.

Great series and smart analysis throughout. Anticipating questions about the “math”:

The ecpm assumptions are pretty tough to nail, particularly in this environment and it is admittedly not Attributor’s expertise.

We do feel confident in the findings that the audience viewing publisher content on unauthorized sites (mostly “legitimate” sites but also including spam blogs) is 5x the audience on publishers’ own destination sites.

Another reason why we feel the opportunity is conservative is the analysis was isolated on U.S. ips only.

Open to other questions, and if anyone wants to see how widespread their content is being reused, they can go to fairshare.cc and signup for free.