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March 28, 2024

AP Licenses A Content “Radar” System

Important Details: Ask the Associated Press (AP) how the news it produces in five languages out of 243 bureaus in 97 countries is being used on the web today, and you’ll get an incomplete answer. The AP, like most news publishers, knows the content licensing agreements it has in place, but it also knows that the web is the Wild West, with all kinds of content, whole and in pieces, being used without its knowledge. That’s why AP has moved beyond the testing stage into a fully announced relationship with Attributor, based in Redwood City, Ca.

“This is our radar system and will point us in the right direction,” Jim Kennedy, vp of strategy for AP, told Outsell. In the first implementation, Attributor will track web usage of AP’s text story content, telling the news service who’s using the content, where and how. Kennedy says that there are three significant values of that knowledge:

  • Building usage knowledge, seeing how content is being used in what context;
  • Finding major misappropriations, and then pursuing licensing arrangements;
  • Enabling web-based licensing, down the road, to bring smaller publishers into the licensing loop.

Attributor says its tracking technique is unique, allowing it to “fingerprint” content by looking at the context around it, including any story metatagging, bylines, attribution, adjacent advertising and more. It can then report back the details of content usage to publishers, allowing distinct modes of “viewing”: compliance, sales and marketing/editorial. Publishers can come to know which stories are getting the most play and where, with what length of legal (or questionable) excerpting and then move on that knowledge both in sales follow-up and deciding what kind of content creation may be most scalable on the web.

Attributor CEO Jim Brock told Outsell that his products, two years in development, will grow to include photo and video monitoring by year’s end. In addition, the company intends to open up a free content “registry.” “Show us a page, and we’ll show you everything we know about it,” he says. The free site will offer more general usage information, while customers like AP will receive more detailed and more timely reports on content usage.

Implications: Attributor’s announced purpose makes sense, as a next-generation solution to a business problem. The notion of “piracy as business development” has been out there for awhile. To make it work efficiently, better systems of content tracking are key. Attributor’s claim is that it is “meta” site, getting on top of any and all other digital rights management and tagging software out there, bringing simplicity of use knowledge out of chaos. The proof of its value, of course, will be in AP’s experience, but it’s clear that it’s a solution badly needed.

As publishers acknowledge the need for wider distribution of their own content through the big and little channels of the day – GYM, the blogosphere, mobile and cable – they need to know that in letting their content roam freely, it can be carefully tracked. The payoff is likely to be mostly ad revenue share monetization, and universal tracking of the content is a fundamental underpinning of such a system. It is too early to determine whether Attributor will be that universal system, but it points publishers in the right direction.