The Medium, The Message

A month-long study of how news spreads across the Internet found that the average American newspaper story is copied 4.4 times in full or in part by unauthorized Web sites, The Financial Times says.

The Fair Syndication Consortium, a group of more than 1,500 newspaper publishers, is trying to figure out how to recoup the revenue publishers lose when their articles appear next to advertising that pays the sites using their materials instead of them. A different study last January estimated the loss at $250 million.

Though publishers can force sites to take unauthorized stories down, “the consortium …  is planning to allow the unauthorized stories to stay up, avoiding any disruption to bloggers and readers, but to push for a share of the sites’ revenues,” the Financial Times says.

“But rather than seeking small payments from each of the tens of thousands of sites involved, the publishers plan to lean on the handful of large advertising networks that account for most of the sites’ revenues. They plan to push the ad networks to divert revenue from the sale of ads alongside their stories back to the creators of that content.”

Google accounted for 53 percent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories, while Yahoo accounted for 19 percent. Bloggers, often the primary target of publishers’ anger about how their stories are disseminated online, accounted for less than 10 percent of the unauthorized reuse.

The study apparently did not address how many readers click through unauthorized story links to spend time on the original publishers’ sites, thereby benefiting them and their advertisers.

At the tailend of its stories, FT.com says, “You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by e-mail or post to the Web.”