Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Facebook patents user tracking for advertisers and content providers

Today, August 19, 2014, USPTO awarded Facebook patent 8,812,591 titled Social networking system data exchange (Inventors: Kent Schoen and Gokul Rajaram)

The patent covers a technology that tracks users across multiple service providers by matching service provider ID and social network ID. The match results in an aggregated user profile that determines user eligibility for content and ad targeting. The system uses a tracking pixel instead of the web cookie, which makes it suitable for mobile applications.


The technology breaks the wall between different publishers with regard to what they know about the user. As the patent says:
...a publisher may know very limited information about a user visiting the publisher's web page or the publisher's application. Thus, a publisher is unable to effectively target content item and advertisements to the user based on the user's interests and characteristics. The exchange server aggregates a user's information from several sources, including a social networking system, publishers, retailers, content item providers, etc.
The exchange server matches advertisements to users based on whether users' characteristics as provided by the aggregated social graph match the advertisements' targeting criteria. Additionally, the exchange server selects one or more advertisements to display to the user based on expected revenue to be generated from displaying the advertisement to the user.


tags: patent, invention, innovation, facebook, social, networking, graph, content

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That should be done bit earlier as Facebook is making most of the money from this advertisement section exclusively…

Jagdish said...

USPTO did not do its job correctly. I innovated on this idea an year earlier while I was executing my startup TopGifter.com and filed a patent for it at https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120030027A1/en?q=social&assignee=nomula