Content Tracking Service Tynt Scores $3.9 Million in Series A Funding

Tynt, a start-up that allows publishers to monitor and track when users copy content from a web site, has secured $3.9 million in series A funding led by iNovia Capital, AVAC Ltd, along with angel investors.

Tynt’s product, Tracer, lets website publishers see what content is being copied and pasted off their sites. Each time a user copies content from a website and pastes it into an email, blog or website, Tracer automatically adds a URL link back to the original site’s content, helping to drive traffic back to the original site. Publishers can easily add the Tracer technology to the code of their site by inserting Tracer’s one line of java script in any site template.

This could be a promising tool for publishers and bloggers who are concerned about the dissemination of their content, including both images and text, without proper attribution. Plus, site owners can use the service to measure content that is engaging users. Currently in beta testing, Tracer is being used by close to 200 content publishers including news media and bloggers with up to 30 million page views per month. Tynt says that in the first two weeks of beta testing, Tracer has tracked over 250,000 user selections and copying actions.

Here’s an example of text copied and pasted off of Tynt’s blog:

Tynt’s patent pending Tracer technology is currently deployed on sites around the globe and has already tracked several hundred thousand user actions and recorded the copy of millions of words and images on hundreds of web sites.

Read more: “About Tynt « Tynt Blog

Following the free beta cycle, Tynt plans to roll out both a free and paid premium service to users. Other services like Copyscape and Sentinal, allow publishers to monitor and view sites that have copied their content without permission, but Tracer appears to be the only product that helps drive traffic back to the original publisher’s site. But it is easy enough for users to circumvent Tracer’s technology by simply deleting the link after the cut and paste.