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.
Doubt it will prevent much content theft, but at least it could make it easier for people to attribute content when they aren’t just stealing it.
Robin, we aren’t so much trying to prevent content theft as wanting to make sure that when your content does leave your site that it benefits you in some way.
Email is still the number one way that most people choose to share content they find online. We want to make sure that the content is correctly attributed to the original site, and that a live link helps to drive more traffic back to the source.
Derek
Tynt.
I agree. Your program works great for email. Your next step in innovation should be to figure out a way to prevent deletion of the link when ppl copy content from another blog onto their own.
If your program can do that, you’d be money. Everyone and their mom who has a blog would use your service.
this is so funny.
This is a great idea to website owner and i’m sure it will benefit most of the website.This is the first thing every website has to do, you don’t want another coder stealing your content.
You might not prevent all of the stealing happen , but leaving a signature to stealer website benefit the original owner specially creating a link inside the stealer website.
Well you can easily remove the link that is added if you are truly “stealing” content. This works for people who aren’t trying to hide the fact that they are copying content from somewhere.
Maybe they’ll refuse to show the page if the browser is running noscript.
Please, go back to sleep.
It’s a neat little hack, but this is clearly not worthy of $MM of VC money before proving itself as a profitable business.
I’ve read over the Javascript. A good web developer could reverse engineer the whole shebang in a few weeks.
I’d say it compares with one of the better YCombinator graduates, i.e. maybe worth a $100k angel investment.
These VCs clearly have no idea what they’re doing. Kudos to the entrepreneurs for talking them out of so much cash!
I think the value here is in the analytics suite. Building *everything*, including the analytics, the engineering facility to support large-scale link tracking, and so on is a huge task.
Sure, TTT Lawyer, there’s some analytics there, but technically it’s still prety simple stuff. I don’t know how much experience you have with software development, but there’s nothing “hard” (à la Google) about what they’re doing. Being “large-scale” is a non-issue since this application is trivial to partition/shard by user. This means it can be scaled on cheap hardware or an even cheaper cloud computing platform. If these guys *have* sunk $MM into building a huge custom scalable solution before proving usage (and revenue), then they’re just as silly as their VCs.
someone send me an example.. im copying pasting stuff of there site, and i don’t see any links to anywhere. Fail
Go to a site that has the tynt tracer – like guy kawasaki’s blog. Copy it and paste it into an email or a blog draft. See if the link comes up.
Seriously? This is as easy as pie and you don’t get it?
Basic common sense Fail!
I don’t see any links either. I tried copy pasting from their blog to Wordpress draft and email. Nothing happens.
Ok. I got it. It only works with Firefox and IE. LOL
What crap.
I’m using Opera. Opera FTW!!
I’m curious as to what sort of paid-for premium service could be added to this and how said service would justify such a large capital investment.
How does this compare to FairShare? I’ve signed up for their beta and so far it’s only found 217 words copied from my blogl. I’m not sure I see the business value with these types of services.
Sorry, maybe I miss-understood, but how can Tynt track content in a private e-mail message and insert links into that message? If that is true, surely there are privacy issues.
“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.”
It doesn’t track content within your email. If you happen to copy text from another site into your email, it will add a link back to that site.
Sure, when people want to plagiarize your work they will not remove the added link… I prefer to actively track my content with http://seeSources.com or http://copygator.com/
I featured it a few days ago on my blog here…
http://web2craw...tent-theft-now/
1. copy content
2. paste content into text editor that won’t interpreter metadata (notepad, nano, vi)
3. copy from notepad
4. sound of flushing cash in toilet
It’s much simpler to just adblock the script.
Then again, that’s also true for web-ads, and they still make lots of money for many people. So I guess this business model is right in relying on the masses not to do anything to subvert this.
Hehehehe, alot of alternatives to this
Many ways to make this
Thanks for the comments, very good alternatives
I can totally see the appeal for bloggers, but what would really help is to find a recourse: what do you do when your content gets stolen?
For example, a website called venture.name has been stealing my full posts (and dozens of other venture capital blogs as well), but there is no way to contact the site and the domain registration info is blocked.
Can Tynt solve that?
Is no one really reading what the purpose of the site is? It’s not to prevent people from stealing your content, but to give attribution when they do copy and paste it into an e-mail or another blog post.
Don’t see this working with scrapers. Pretty easy to get around this. It’s just too easy to yank their code automatically. That’s what I would do if I was in the scraping business.
So are the VCs who funded this thing saying ‘D’oh!!!’ as they read through the comments? If they aren’t, then they deserve to lose every penny.
Interesting concept and at least it has an element to monetize already built into the model. Appears to be fairly easy to get around but the main target (casual consumer) probably won’t even care it’s being ‘tracked’. I’ll be checking justaskgemalto the digital security site though on the privacy issues.