Fair Syndication

Consortium
 Simple question:
What if…
anywhere your content was reused…
you had the option to…
share in the ad revenue it generated?

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 The Fair Syndication Consortium
• Goal – to compensate publishers for their work while
respecting the value of appropriate distribution
• Revenue – share in the revenue from sites monetizing
full copies of your content
• Control – remove ads from the sites you deem
inappropriate for revenue sharing
• Complementary – a new revenue option to
complement existing monetization methods and anti-
piracy efforts.

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 How big of an opportunity?

A $250M annual opportunity

that you can turn on in Q3

Estimated by taking feeds from 25 top publishers in January 2009 and applying conservative
CPMs to content reuse that consisted of over 80% of the original publisher’s content and at
least 125 words. Traffic was estimated using Compete.com data.
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 How Fair Syndication works
Copies of Your Content Across the Web

2) Payment
Web-wide Requests Ad
Registry Copy
Networks
1) Feed of Detection
your
Content Reconciliation
3) Ad Revenue
Share You receive revenue for all
full copy reuse of your content:
Content 4) Revenue $$$ – across the entire Internet
Producers
– revenue split with the republishing
sites, paid out via the ad networks
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 It’s good for the ad networks
• It won’t cost them a nickel – all revenue shared
from the site copying your work, not the ad networks
• Instant heroes – [insert ad network] chooses to
reward publishers of original content instead of only
those reusing your content without authorization
• There is a stick – the ad networks already comply
with DMCA takedown notices to remove their ads from
infringing content; takedowns mean fewer ads served
• The infrastructure is already in place – requires
very little work to deploy
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 Shouldn't GOOG or YHOO do this?
• Doesn’t solve the problem – need to cover all ad
networks and reconcile the payments from each to
ensure proper remuneration is received
• Less money – without a solution that covers all ad
networks, content will jump to new networks, resulting
in less money for you
• Less control – you need flexibility to enforce eCPM
minimums, branding issues, existing licensing/royalty
agreements and anti-piracy

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 Scenario analysis
1. It does not work… the ad networks decide they want a
legal challenge and you receive no additional revenue
– Response: always an option but one that the ad networks will
risk negative public relations as well as probable legal defeat
2. It does work, but… the amount of money you receive is
uninteresting and/or the reusing sites are not brand-worthy
– Response: always possible, no downside in finding out
3. It works… ad networks cooperate and you receive additional
revenue
– Response: everyone wins

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 How does my organization join?
• Signing up is easy
– Online: FairSyndication.org
– Email me: jpitkow@attributor.com
• Provide a feed
– Enables us to start sending instances to the
advertising networks to receive monetization
information
• There are no costs, fees or dues

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Fair Syndication
Consortium
 The Fair Syndication Consortium
• What it is – a collection of 500+ publishers who are
demanding full compensation when others make money
off their articles
• What it isn’t – an official business entity or
clearinghouse; ad revenue share payments for your
content are based solely upon your content’s reuse
• What it does – educates stakeholders and organizes
publishers to participate in Fair Syndication

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 How reuse is detected

Detection if
advertising &
links back to
your content
are present

Highlighting
reveals how
much of your
content is being
Crawl of over reused
35 billion web
pages
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 Key findings from Jan 2009 study
• Tons of reuse – over 30 days, roughly 250,000
articles from the 25 FSC participants were copied in full
without permission more than 3.2 million times
• Tons of money – for FSC participants alone this
represented roughly $50 million in annual revenue
• Big overall opportunity – best estimates are that
the total amount of unauthorized full copy syndication
for newspaper publishers totals over $250M annually

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The “Standard/Simple Measures” feed
• The Feed – a feed provided to ad networks that
identifies which content producers are to be
compensated on which pages and from which pages
ads are to be removed
• The DMCA “safe harbor” requires that service
providers must accommodate and not interfere with
“standard technical measures.” (Section 512(i))
– FairSyndication Analysis: the law expressly provides
for technology solutions to be adopted

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 Simple Measures
• “Simple Measures” In Perfect10 vs. Amazon, the court
said that Google could be held contributorily liable if it had
knowledge that infringing content was available using its search
engine and Amazon could have taken “simple measures” to
prevent further damage and failed to take such steps.
– FairSyndication Analysis: technology now exists to
identify infringing content and make that knowledge
available to advertising networks. Once provided with this
knowledge, an ad network must either remove their ads or…
provide revenue back to the original content producer

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 Standard Technical Measures
• “Standard Technical Measures” are defined as
“measures that copyright owners use to identify or protect
copyrighted works, that have been developed pursuant to a
broad consensus of copyright owners and service providers in an
open, fair and voluntary multi-industry process, are available to
anyone on reasonable nondiscriminatory terms, and do not
impose substantial costs or burdens on service providers.”
– FairSyndication Analysis: the solution must be:
 open to publishers of all sizes
 costs must not burden service providers
 be vetted in an open forum

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