This is the first announcement related to our new Tynt partner program. I hope to be able to share more with you in the not too distant future!

Tynt Insight and Tynt Insight Pro introduce a bunch of great new capabilities that help online publishers, website owners and bloggers really understand how their visitors are interacting with their content, ways to make their most engaging content more visible, drive more visits, and even monetize their site. One of our favorites is our new “AutoTweet” feature which will automatically periodically push a snippet of your most engaging content out to the Twitter account of your choice!

So, many of you are probably asking ‘Why the name change?” We came up with the Tracer name when we first conceived of the product back in 2008 and all it did was track copy and paste activity, so it seemed to fit. But with the release of Tynt Insight, you will see that the new product does so much more than Tracer. Also, while Tynt has never tracked data on people - we have always anonymously collected content copying data - we felt that the Tracer name was incorrectly leading some people to make the assumption that we were collecting data on people. We think you’ll agree that Tynt Insight is a much better and more accurate brand!

BTW - we’re making all of the premium features in Tynt Insight Pro available for free for a while to give lots of people a risk free way to try it out, so be sure to surf over to our product page and check out the details.

In addition, he’ll be highlighting data from a few of the more popular sites now using Tynt, to give precise examples of the copying behavior now being seen.

“Content copying is an issue that keeps content publishers up at night. And until recently, the big problem has been that people had no way of knowing exactly how much content was being copied from their sites and where it was going”, said Derek Ball. “The good news is now we not only have a good handle on that, but we can identify specific actions that site owners can take to use this information to their advantage, to drive more site traffic, and create a more compelling user visit.”

That said, we’re certainly not resting on our laurels.  We’re finishing up on the next round of enhancements to the Tynt service, which we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, and as always, are all ears for new ideas and input from the thousands of sites who have already implemented Tynt on their site.   And while winning awards is always great, we’re equally gratified to hear from our users how they are benefiting the new insight they have gained from understanding exactly what content is most compelling to their visitors. 

With this new insight into what the web audience considers most engaging, we are learning something new every day. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be sharing our learning with you here on this blog about what we call ‘casual copying behavior”. But, there are a few key things we’d like to share right at the start.

As thousands of websites have adopted Tynt, the comment we most frequently hear from site owners and content creators is “Wow – I had no idea so much of my content is being copied!”. Two of the most frequent follow on questions we get are: “Is this good or is this bad?” and “What should I do about it?” We could write pages on these topics (and we will certainly be addressing both future blog posts) but here are our observations on these so far:

1) Most content copying is non-malicious. On sites running Tynt we find that anywhere from 2 to 15% of page views result in a copy action (some sites are as high as 50%!) From what we can infer, the vast majority of cut and pastes are done strictly to keep personal track of content that they find interesting, or to share it with a few of their friends. They are not copying it to re-use somewhere else. Certainly that happens too, but thankfully, it appears to be a very small percentage.

2) The average length of a copy is in the range of 130-150 words, so people are not, in general, copying whole articles, or even whole paragraphs. In fact, this amount of content would probably fall within the margin of “fair use” from a copyright perspective.

3) Sites that use Tynt can actually benefit from copy and paste since the Tynt attribution links can drive significant traffic to specific pages. For some content, we’ve seen the traffic generated from Tynt links constitute as much as 90% of traffic to that particular page.

To sum up, from the data we can see so far, having people copy and paste your content is actually good – your data is being shared virally, by well intended visitors, and they can drive incremental visits back to your site. We’d suggest that you do nothing to try to stop it. In fact you might even want to encourage it! Perhaps you could choose particular pieces of content that you invite people to copy and share - because with Tynt, you know  there will be a link inserted leading back to your site.

As many of our Tracer users know, having your content spread virally, with the appropriate attribution and use, is one of the best ways to grow your business and site traffic. Creative Commons is the leading organization that promotes reuse of content while complying with copyright law. There are over 250M pieces of content on the Internet now protected under Creative Commons licenses.

Now Tracer offers a new option for CC license users which will automatically add an extra line to the attribution showing exactly what Creative Commons license covers their content. As always, when you apply the new Tracer Creative Commons code to your site (and it takes just a few minutes), anytime a visitor to your site cuts and pastes your content to an email, document or other site, Tracer automatically attaches an attribution line with a link back to your original content. And now, it can include a Creative Commons licensing line indicating which of the six Creative Commons license types you use. Here’s an example of how the attribution would look for a post from the Tynt blog:

Read more: http://tracer.tynt.com/press-room#ixzz0MCVFlcXd
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

If you already use a Creative Commons user, update your Tracer code with this new feature. Set up is Tynt easy: log into your tracer account click on ’script’, check the “Creative Commons License” box, and select the type of CC license. Your unique tracer line of code will be generated, so just add it to each page in your site, or replace the current Tracer code you already have.

If you aren’t currently using a Creative Commons license, you should definitely pop over to creativecommons.org and look into it. They posted about it on their blog as well.

Try it out and send us your thoughts, and spread the word about Tynt and Creative Commons.

Launch Party 7 was an outstanding event with the highest number of attendees in recorded history. Congratulations to all the other companies at the event - we hear it was a tight finish!

Tynt Takes Home Judges AND People's Choice at LP7

Now you can use Tracer to find out what is being copied from your blog and to drive traffic back to your content when someone copies/pastes from your site. Tracer makes sure you get credit and return traffic each time your content is shared without your knowledge.

Visit Tynt.com to set up your Tracer account and then visit our blog to see instructions on how to add Tracer to Blogspot/Blogger.

We are working hard to round out the number of Blogs we can support. Keep sending your vote for the next blog platform Tracer should support to feedback[@]tynt.com.