With the huge growth of viral media sites such as buzzfeed, and content sharing communities (like reddit), the line between fair use and copyright has become a little blurred to say the least.
If you create and publish a high quality image - be that a photo, or a custom visual – there is a fair chance that it will be 'borrowed' at some point by another website; generally with loose attribution, or often with no credit at all .
Fortunately, as a smart marketer, this is something you can leverage to your advantage.
Each unattributed use of your original work is a link opportunity, and one in which you are in the rare position of holding the upper hand. Reach out to those who have swiped your images, thank them for using them, and ask for a link.
Here is a real world example of someone doing just that (a site I am involved with had inadvertently used an image without attribution).
Pretty painless right?
The above example was a photograph, but it could just as easily been a chart, or other custom visual.
What to do
Take the time to create high quality, custom visuals for your content, then actively encourage other webmasters to share them (with attribution). If you find another site has reposted your visual without credit, send a short, friendly, email similar to the above.
How to find other sites using your images
Example: if you are using chrome, Google makes this pretty easy.
Searchmetrics Rank Correlations 2014 post features a very useful chart that has been shared a number of times across the web.
If we right click on the image in chrome, we have an option to 'Search Google for this image'.
Clicking on that will bring us to a Google image search page, which lists other URLs using the image.
If you find a site using one of your images without attribution, go ahead and reach out and pick up that link!
Further Reading
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