Hundreds of thousands of websites are using a new service to track when readers copy and paste content from their sites into an email, blog post or elswhere. The service, called Tynt, isn’t just making sure that credit is given where it is due – it’s tracking what content is of interest to readers… right down to the word.
Tynt says that people copy and paste content and links 50 times as often as they click on sharing buttons to post to networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now the company is opening up a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow publishers to track automatically what particular words readers on their site are interested in. That data has incredible potential, but it’s not clear it will be used in ways that befit the opportunity it presents.