Tynt Tracer is now Tynt Insight!

October 28 09

As you probably noticed, we have a new name! Tynt Insight and Tynt Insight Pro offer all of the functionality that was in our Tynt Tracer beta product, plus a LOT more. The official announcement will come in a few days, but needless to say, Tynt Insight is the result of months of effort by everyone in our company, and more importantly reflects a ton of great input from the thousands of websites that used Tynt Tracer beta product. Thanks to all of you who gave us tremendous feedback over the past year.

Tynt Insight and Tynt Insight Pro introduce a bunch of great new capabilities that help online publishers, website owners and bloggers really understand how their visitors are interacting with their content, ways to make their most engaging content more visible, drive more visits, and even monetize their site. One of our favorites is our new “AutoTweet” feature which will automatically periodically push a snippet of your most engaging content out to the Twitter account of your choice!

So, many of you are probably asking ‘Why the name change?” We came up with the Tracer name when we first conceived of the product back in 2008 and all it did was track copy and paste activity, so it seemed to fit. But with the release of Tynt Insight, you will see that the new product does so much more than Tracer. Also, while Tynt has never tracked data on people - we have always anonymously collected content copying data - we felt that the Tracer name was incorrectly leading some people to make the assumption that we were collecting data on people. We think you’ll agree that Tynt Insight is a much better and more accurate brand!

BTW - we’re making all of the premium features in Tynt Insight Pro available for free for a while to give lots of people a risk free way to try it out, so be sure to surf over to our product page and check out the details.

Posted in Product Info |

Get More Out of Your Attribution Link

October 13 09

Great news! For all of the Tynt users out there who have been asking to modify the attribution link – we’ve been listening! As of today, you can now in your scripted settings, change what comes both before and after the link, and the format that you want the link to have. This is a great way to increase your branding and SEO potential with custom tag lines and anchor text. Go ahead, try it out!

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Posted in Product Info |

Tynt Garners Award at Banff Venture Forum 2009

October 6 09

Banff Venture Forum 2009The Banff Venture Forum has evolved into one of the leading startup financing events in North America, with over 30 selected companies from IT, Energy and Life Sciences presenting to investors from throughout Canada and the US. We were extremely pleased to be selected to present our story at this year’s event, but even more gratified to learn that Tynt received the Best Presenting Company award. As anyone who has ever pitched a company to investors knows, it’s not always the easiest audience to impress, so to be judged to have the best presentation among dozens of other great companies is a real honor. We believe this is yet further confirmation that not only are we delivering something not only of real value today to online publishers, content owners and bloggers, but we’re destined to become a highly successful company. Congrats to our own Derek Ball for doing a great job with the Tynt presentation. (BTW – if you are going to BlogWorldExpo in Las Vegas in a few weeks, you’ll have your own opportunity to hear Derek speak.)

Posted in Product Info |

Tynt’s Derek Ball to Speak at Blog World Expo

October 1 09

Tynt CEO and co-founder Derek Ball has been selected to speak at the upcoming BlogWorld Expo event which takes place in Las Vegas Oct 15-17. His talk, “Can You Benefit from Rampant Copying of Your Content?” will target an issue that is near and dear to just about every blogger and online publishers: content being copied from their sites. In it, he’ll draw on information gleaned to date from the over 5 Billion page views per month on 100,000 sites that now use Tynt. Specifically, he’ll provide insight into
How much content is being copied?
What kind of content is being copied?
What do we know about the intention of the people who copy content?
What should a blogger or content publisher do about it, if anything?

In addition, he’ll be highlighting data from a few of the more popular sites now using Tynt, to give precise examples of the copying behavior now being seen.

“Content copying is an issue that keeps content publishers up at night. And until recently, the big problem has been that people had no way of knowing exactly how much content was being copied from their sites and where it was going”, said Derek Ball. “The good news is now we not only have a good handle on that, but we can identify specific actions that site owners can take to use this information to their advantage, to drive more site traffic, and create a more compelling user visit.”

Posted in Product Info |

Tynt Selected as TechRev Innovator for 2009

October 1 09

Tech-Rev Innovators AwardAs we put in the long hours to continue to build Tynt into one of the most useful services for online publishers, bloggers and major websites, it’s really nice to get a pat on the back along the way.   So, naturally we were very pleased to learn that Tynt was selected as one of the 10 hottest tech companies in our headquarters city of Calgary, from a pool of over 132 nominations.    For those of you who haven’t been to Calgary, you may not know that it has evolved into one of Canada’s fastest growing regions for innovation and new technologies, and certainly 132 nominations is an indicator of that entrepreneurial activity – that would be a lot for any city.   Given that, it’s an honor to be recognized, and certainly a nice confirmation of the value we are bringing to the world of online publishing.  

That said, we’re certainly not resting on our laurels.  We’re finishing up on the next round of enhancements to the Tynt service, which we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, and as always, are all ears for new ideas and input from the thousands of sites who have already implemented Tynt on their site.   And while winning awards is always great, we’re equally gratified to hear from our users how they are benefiting the new insight they have gained from understanding exactly what content is most compelling to their visitors. 

Posted in Product Info |

Your Content Is Copied More Than You Realize

September 14 09

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.

Posted in Product Info |

Creative Commons and Tynt Partner for Better Content Attribution

July 24 09

cclogo Tynt Tracer is all about helping online content owners get credit for their content and driving more traffic to their sites. But Tracer also helps people who innocently copy and paste content use the content correctly. That’s why we are so excited about our new partnership with Creative Commons: it’s a huge step forward in both of those areas.

As many of our Tracer users know, having your content spread virally, with the appropriate attribution and use, is one of the best ways to grow your business and site traffic. Creative Commons is the leading organization that promotes reuse of content while complying with copyright law. There are over 250M pieces of content on the Internet now protected under Creative Commons licenses.

Now Tracer offers a new option for CC license users which will automatically add an extra line to the attribution showing exactly what Creative Commons license covers their content. As always, when you apply the new Tracer Creative Commons code to your site (and it takes just a few minutes), anytime a visitor to your site cuts and pastes your content to an email, document or other site, Tracer automatically attaches an attribution line with a link back to your original content. And now, it can include a Creative Commons licensing line indicating which of the six Creative Commons license types you use. Here’s an example of how the attribution would look for a post from the Tynt blog:

Read more: http://tracer.tynt.com/press-room#ixzz0MCVFlcXd
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

If you already use a Creative Commons user, update your Tracer code with this new feature. Set up is Tynt easy: log into your tracer account click on ’script’, check the “Creative Commons License” box, and select the type of CC license. Your unique tracer line of code will be generated, so just add it to each page in your site, or replace the current Tracer code you already have.

If you aren’t currently using a Creative Commons license, you should definitely pop over to creativecommons.org and look into it. They posted about it on their blog as well.

Try it out and send us your thoughts, and spread the word about Tynt and Creative Commons.

Posted in Product Info |

From the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society - Tynt Wins Big at LPV7!

June 4 09

The votes have been counted and we are excited to tell you Tynt came out the big winner at the LPV7 Startup Contest. A panel of 6 Judges voted Tynt as “Startup Most Likely to Succeed” and, for the first time ever in LPV history Tynt won both Judge’s and People’s favorite!

Launch Party 7 was an outstanding event with the highest number of attendees in recorded history. Congratulations to all the other companies at the event - we hear it was a tight finish!

Tynt Takes Home Judges AND Peoples Choice at LP7

Tynt Takes Home Judges AND People's Choice at LP7

Posted in Product Info |

Tynt Plays Well with Others - Now supporting Blogger/Blogspot sites

April 8 09

Good News for those of you who have been waiting patiently to add Tracer to your Blog. We have recently widened the Tracer beta program to include those sites hosted by Blogspot and Blogger. Hat Tip to Justin at JustinPlusOne.com for helping us work this out!

Now you can use Tracer to find out what is being copied from your blog and to drive traffic back to your content when someone copies/pastes from your site. Tracer makes sure you get credit and return traffic each time your content is shared without your knowledge.

Visit Tynt.com to set up your Tracer account and then visit our blog to see instructions on how to add Tracer to Blogspot/Blogger.

We are working hard to round out the number of Blogs we can support. Keep sending your vote for the next blog platform Tracer should support to feedback[@]tynt.com.

Posted in Product Info |