A new study today from Attributor indicates the audience perusing unlicensed copies of news stories is about 1.4 times larger than the audience on the legitimate sites themselves.
The pirated content is costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. While the estimate is vague, the point of the study is to quantify the loss of traffic to sites that take liberties with copyrighted material.
Attributor looked at some 30 billion Web pages with copyrighted material from 100 sites, ruled out those that ran mere snippets of the content, and drew its conclusion about infringement and impact.
