Helping cut and paste with Tynt

If you copy bits of text from other webpages while doing research, you may have noticed that some add a URL to what you copied. It might be as simple as "Read more at xyz.com".

I appreciate that addition - it saves me from getting the URL myself. I'm not out to steal their content; I intend to attribute it and adding the URL automatically saves me a few seconds of time and eliminates having to go back to track it down if I forgot that step.

But how do these sites do that and why?

They certainly aren't using it for copy protection: only the most careless thief would leave that URL intact as they pasted what they copied into their own site. Certainly someone could be that clueless, but nobody would count on that for copy protection.

Why?

Let's take the why first. One reason is as I said above: it makes things easier for the person doing the copying. But it also lets those sites add tracking to the links so that they can later know that someone used a URL that was copied in that way. That's just another useful bit of SEO information that helps you understand your visitors. Knowing what is being copied tells you what interested someone the most; knowing that can give you a clue as to where to concentrate future efforts.

How?

It's just a bit of Javascript. If you don't care about perfection, it's not even hard to understand Javascript - here's a snippet. The author says won't work with IE, but it gives you the idea.

There are services that offer more bullet proof code. The one I added to my website is from Tynt.com (recently bought by 33Across). You just create a free account, answer some questions about how you want the code to work. They give you the code that you then add to your website.

Hubbers: you can't do this at HubPages. HubPages itself would need to make such a feature available.

Instant results

I was quite surprised to see reports on cut and paste activity within just a few hours of adding the code. Seventeen cuts with URLs were made out of 65 overall. Prior to this, I would have had no idea if anyone ever copied anything, but obviously it happens quite frequently.

The next day (a Saturday) showed 102 cuts made with 40 having URL's and two visits from that activity.

By the way, I should mention that some people absolutely hate this idea. John Gruber at Daring Fireball was quite scathing in his detest for sites that do this. That's OK, John: I don't think much of Daring Fireball either.

Why is Tynt so generous?

I mentioned that this is free. Why would anyone give us free tools like that?

Of course the answer is that they are selling data to advertisers. I don't know how you feel about it, but if my site is getting a lot of cut and paste activity from certain pages, I'd be happy to have advertisers know about that. Why wouldn't I?

Daring Fireball assumes that Tynt will eventually add obnoxious advertisements to the paste. I doubt it, but do I really care? If they do, I'll just go find someone else who offers a similar service without the extra ads.

Wait, there is more!

Tynt also provides an entry and exit keyword report. That could help you know what you need to add to a page to keep visitors happier. They have other reports too, so this is better than writing your own Javascript.

Certainly you may annoy someone like John Gruber. Do you care? I don't - the chances of John mentioning anything that I'd ever write are infinitesimal. Most people won't mind this added URL at all and it will give you information you did not previously have.

Your thoughts

Do you do this? Do you agree with Gruber and think it's awful or would you like to have the associated data?

Let me know!

Update

In a week of use, Tynt has recorded over 2,000 text copies and a few image copies. There have also been over 500 new page views from those links.

Would I have had those visits and views without Tynt? I think the answer is probably yes, but I can't be certain, of course. Certainly I'd never have known their source.