Report: Your Web Audience May Be 1.5 Times Larger Away From Your Site

A new study of more than 100 publishers in categories ranging from entertainment to technology found that original content from those publishers on other sites had an audience 1.5 times larger than the original destination site viewership.

Web content monitoring and programming platform Attributor Corp. tracked RSS feeds across 30 billion Web pages during September 2008. The study found that automotive and travel categories have the most significant viewers on other sites (five to seven times high than publisher destination sites.

Multiples for audience beyond the destination site include:

Auto: nearly 7x
Travel: more than 5x
Movie reviews: nearly 5x
Entertainment: nearly 4x
Sports, Technology: more than 2x
Advice, Environment, Health: nearly 2x
Politics: nearly 1.5x

Using a CPM of $1, the study estimated that 42 percent of publishers are missing $50,000 in annual ad revenue; 33 percent are missing up to $250,000 in ad revenue; and 25 percent are missing more than $250,000 in annual ad revenue from off-site content. Attributor Corp. suggests publishers can start seeing some of that revenue by leveraging open syndication through direct relationships with ad networks (Attributor is working with publishers and ad networks to quantify the Web audience and come up with ways publishers can get a cut of the revenue from viral syndication.)

Rise of 'Link Journalism'

Meanwhile, publishers are starting to grow more comfortable with the idea of their original content sitting on someone else's site-even the New York Times plans to launch an alternative home page featuring links to its competitors. Publish2 is an online network for journalists that makes linking and news aggregation easier. The site soft launched this summer (founder Scott Karp is credited with coining the term "link journalism").

Michelle Leder is author of the site Footnoted.org, which focuses on items that companies bury in their routine SEC filings, and an early member of Publish2. "In my sidebar I link to stories that I think will be of interest to my readers, who tend to be hedge fund/money managers, given the specific nature of my content," she says. "Unlike a lot of other blogs, I do new reporting based on stuff in the filings, so I don't spent a lot of time commenting on stories in the WSJ, Times, etc. The Publish2 widget gives me an opportunity to easily link to these stories."

A more extensive look at Publish2 will appear in FOLIO:'s December issue.

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By Matt Kinsman --

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