As just about every Tynt user finds out – content is copied much more than most people realize. By anonymously tracking what content site visitors highlight and copy, Tynt opens up a completely new way of looking at how people view and consume content on the web, while retaining their complete privacy. We don’t collect any identifiable data about the visitor at all.
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.