Fair Syndication Consortium To Fight Splogs
By Anna Johnson on April 23rd, 2009A consortium of media groups including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico have formed the Fair Syndication Consortium to fight ‘splogs’ (spam blogs) and other sites that infringe copyright by publishing news and blog feeds without permission or attribution.
The Fair Syndication Consortium plans to fight splogs by negotiating with the ad networks that tend to serve ads on such sites, primarily DoubleClick, Google (via its AdSense network) and Yahoo.
Rather than necessarily force the ad networks to ban splogs from their networks, the Fair Syndication Consortium will demand a portion of the ad revenues from those sites.
Writing in TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld reckons this approach may just work.
Apparently, the ad revenues made by splogs range between $13 million and $51 million… and 94 percent of those sites serve ads from the three aforementioned ad networks: DoubleClick, Google AdSense and Yahoo.
An added plus is that the Fair Syndication Consortium will offer to use technology from startup company Attributor. Attributor will keep track of where and how publishers’ content is being used and administer payments by the ad networks.
The Fair Syndication Consortium is open to any publisher – including blogs – to join.
