Patent Application
20060053076
The invention relates to the monetization and/or distribution of classified advertising, classifieds on network-connected media, online classifieds, any advertising on electronic displays such as advertising via electronic bill boards, (collectively “eclassifieds”) using techniques for more timely and wider exposure of time-sensitive content on online networks. Such techniques include using XML feeds and are based on the type of search engine involved, the geo-location of the web-surfer, the demographic and psychographic profile of the web surfer, and bandwidth requirements of the web-surfer. The distribution of eclassifieds include methods for converting the taxonomy of eclassifieds into a suitable taxonomy for pushing the eclassifieds as XML feeds, or data dumps or other similar formats into a number of different search engines, directories and the like (collectively “search engines”).
The trend in online advertising is the increasing exchange of advertising related information between pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements and the advertising results served up by search engines. Search engines such as Google, AltaVista and Yahoo produce free results from search phrase queries that are displayed prominently for the web surfer, usually in the middle of the results page. Most of the time these free results are preceded by, surrounded by, intermixed with, or even followed by paid text results and/or banner advertisements. These paid results are likely using either CPA (cost per action), CPM (cost per thousand), or PPC (pay per click) financial models. Advertisers, not surfers, pay for the “paid” results. Thus search engines are “free.”
In the context of online advertising and paid results, how does eclassifieds fit in? Currently, eclassifieds very rarely, if at all, appear in paid results served up by search engines.
To explain, electronic classifieds (“eclassifieds”) are simply classifieds available online via the Internet or World Wide Web (“web”), or on any network-connected media or electronic displays. In general, eclassifieds are electronic representations of classifieds formatted for newspaper, magazine, or other print publication. Eclassifieds are typically posted on the web via online versions of print publications, such as Rich Media, etc. The typical eclassified advertisement represents a unique offer, wherein the underlying content likely changes frequently.
As will be appreciated, the underlying classified content may change for a variety of reasons such as a) a sale of the advertised product, b) a decision not to sell, c) a temporary withdrawal from the market as the advertiser negotiates, changes price or other details of the sale, or d) other reasons. Hence, eclassifieds are extremely time sensitive, extremely short-lived and are of little use to anyone unless found by potential web surfers in a very timely fashion.
Rather than directly accessing eclassifieds via their original source (e.g., online versions of print publication, etc.), the typical web surfer uses one or more search engines to access classifieds. This occurs for several reasons. One reason is that the typical web-surfer uses one or more search engines to access classifieds. First, the web surfer might not know any or all of the electronic addresses (URLs) of publications that might have items of interest. “Items of interest” may include both “sell an item(s)” and “buy an item(s).”
Second, the market has moved away from local, and regional newspapers online and other online sources of classifieds for news in general to national sources (such as http:/www.cnn.com or http://www.yahoo.com). Thus, web surfers are less familiar with the online local and regional newspapers because the surfers are more likely to read the non-electronic versions of the local and regional newspapers, if at all.
Third, online classifieds are harder to search because such searches are more structured due to the rigid nomenclature of the classifieds. The rigid nomenclature, while more accurate, is harder to use as each category has its own nomenclature or structured content. Search engines usually do not perform better with structured content.
Notwithstanding the myriad reasons in favor of having eclassifieds appear in paid results served up by search engines, the problem remains that eclassifieds do not appear in paid results because there are currently no adequate mechanisms for achieving such a goal.
Further, indexing of eclassifieds is not viable because there are no web pages associated with an eclassified, which can be indexed. Even if indexing is viable, search engines, because of the overwhelming amount of content on the Internet, suffer from the well-known and persistent problem of long latency between the introduction of new or modified content to the web and the indexing of such content by the search engine. This latency period may extend from days to months (e.g., Google® currently has about a six-week latency period), by which point digital content such as eclassifieds is often irrelevant. At the extreme of irrelevancy, the eclassified may no longer exist on the publisher's or newspaper's sites. For example, the formatting of the pointers to the eclassifieds, or the link pointing to the digital content may no longer function. In some cases, the results of the indexing (which might be more than three months old) are cached. However such cached content is usually useless because of its age.
As described below in greater detail, the lack of cooperation between eclassified providers and search engine providers are primary causes for the failure of search engines to present desired eclassifieds in a meaningful and timely manner to web surfers.
Search engines such as Google and AlITheWeb use numerous different techniques to locate and prioritize content. As a result, there is no single eclassified content format that is ideal for exposure to all search engines. Thus, inconsistency among search engine algorithms creates a wall between digital classified content providers and their intended audience.
To further exacerbate the difficulties experienced by the web surfer and the eclassified distributor, providers and/or distributors of eclassifieds often view search engine providers as competitors, and vice versa. This is particularly true in the areas of branding and customer retention. Newspapers and other traditional classifieds providers perceive Google, Yahoo and other portals as competition. This competition detracts from meaningful cooperation between eclassified distributors and search portals, which in turn makes it more difficult for the web surfer to uncover meaningful content.
Because eclassifieds are more difficult to successfully use through use of search engines, eclassifieds achieve less than their full potential value. As a result, the value of eclassifieds is diminished from their optimum value.
These and other issues are addressed by the invention as described herein.
An affiliate is a site where the web surfer types in his search query. Partners are sources of paid advertisements. While many search engines have their own advertising listings, search engines are in the business of providing their paid listings to other search engines. In such a context, search engines are partner sites. Thus, a search engine may either be an affiliate or a partner site, depending on where the web surfer enters the search query. An exchange is an entity that is an intermediary between affiliates and other partners of the exchange.
To illustrate by way of example, according to certain embodiments, assume that a web surfer types in a search phrase on an affiliate site. The affiliate site converts the search phrase into a real-time XML query feed 133. First, the affiliate may query the affiliate's own internal advertising base or the affiliate's own partners' sites in an attempt to satisfy the web surfer's search query. The affiliate site then pushes the search query XML feed 133 to the third party aggregator 130. The third party aggregator 130 attempts to find content in the third party aggregator's databases that satisfies the search query. If none of the third party aggregator's databases contain any content that satisfies the search query, then the third party aggregator will pull content that satisfies the search query from one or more sources 132a-b (i.e., partner sites). The content that satisfies the search query is herein referred to as search results. When the third party obtains the search results, either from querying its own databases or by pulling search results from one or more sources 132a-b, the third party aggregator converts the search results into an XML search results feed 136. The third party aggregator then pushes the XML search results feed 136 to affiliate 134 to satisfy the web surfer's search query. It is to be noted that the elapsed time starting when the web surfer enters the search query up to the time when the web surfer sees the results displayed on the affiliate site is a fraction of a second. The complex manner in which the web surfer's search query is satisfied is performed seamlessly and is completely transparent to the web surfer. Thus, the web surfer is provided a positive surfing experience.
The XML feed in push format may take a variety of forms and may vary from implementation to implementation. According to certain embodiments, the push format may include a title element, a keyword search element, a description element, a support URL element, an IP address, and a monetization URL element. The XML feed may also include information such as the geo-location of the web-surfer, the demographic and psychographic profile of the web surfer, and bandwidth requirements of the web-surfer. Such information can be used to tailor the search results for the web surfer. An example of an XML query is:
The XML push format is described in greater detail herein with reference to
When the affiliate site receives the XML search results feed, the affiliate sorts the listings in the search results. The listings in the search results that generate the most profit for the affiliate are displayed most prominently. To illustrate, assume for example, if a surfer types in “Surfing in San Diego” at http://www.Kanoodle.Com, Kanoodle might only have three listings starting at $0.06 and going to $0.04. In this case, Kanoodle will likely query its partners with this search term. Assume that GalaxySearch is one of these partners. Further assume that GalaxySearch only has two of its own paid listings for “Surfing in San Diego”—one at $0.20 and another at $0.06. Assuming a 60% revenue share arrangement with Kanoodle, Kanoodle will list the GalaxySearch listing at $0.12 (60%*$0.20) return first, then its own listing at $0.06, $0.05 and $0.04 in the second, third and fourth positions, and finally a GalaxySearch listing at $0.036 (60% * $0.06). As part of GalaxySearch's list finding process, GalaxySearch might also query its own set of proprietary partners (other than Kanoodle to prevent loops) looking for “Surfing in San Diego.” If paid listings are found and a “time out” has not occurred, the listings from GalaxySearch's partners will be sent to GalaxySearch at the revenue share arrangement between GalaxySearch and its partners. Then those results from the partner and GalaxySearch's own results are sent to Kanoodle. At this point, Kanoodle sorts all the results by the net revenue that Kanoodle would make and displays the results accordingly.
Further, the third party aggregator is adapted to perform fraud checks on the search results before the results are pushed to the affiliates. Fraud checks include checking the results for accuracy and legality. For example, no child pornography material will be allowed to pass through. As another example, checks are made to ensure that a click is made by a human searcher rather than a robot.
Thus, the third party aggregator can satisfy, for both affiliates and web surfers, the priorities that include: 1) relevancy of results; and b) speed of results; and c) results displayed correctly on their browser.
To reiterate, the partnerships allow the third party aggregator to:
1) gather the time-sensitive content 136a-b;
2) process the time-sensitive content to form customized formatted content 138; and
3) feed the customized formatted content directly to the plurality of search engine providers 134a-c (affiliates) in the partnership.
The processing of the time-sensitive content to form customized formatted content is described in greater detain herein with reference to
The third party aggregator attracts search engine providers (affiliates) into the partnership by performing one or more of the following:
1) providing time-sensitive content to the search engine providers (affiliates) that the search engine providers would otherwise not obtain without a great deal of effort;
2) providing a fruitful experience to web surfers who use the search engines of the search engine providers in the partnership by giving the web surfers rapid and relevant search results in response to queries for time-sensitive content. Thus, the traffic is increased at the search engine providers' sites;
3) providing clean listings by checking for accuracy and legality;
4) increasing the value and prices that the affiliates can charge for advertising space because of increased traffic at their sites;
5) associating with a highly profitable anchor e-business that earns a substantially large market revenue in order to increase traffic for the affiliates;
6) sharing revenue obtained from monetizing the time-sensitive content with the affiliates;
7) providing transparency in accounting; and
8) providing fraud accounting protection.
The third party aggregator attracts providers of time-sensitive content (partner sites) into the partnership by performing one or more of the following:
1) providing a one-stop service for feeding the partner's time-sensitive content to some or all of the affiliates;
2) providing an upsell to the originator (e.g., advertiser of the e-classified) of the time-sensitive content when the originator submits his e-classified to partner sites;
3) providing branding for the partner sites by a) linking the web-surfer directly to the partner's landing site, b) including the partner's logo as part of the search results listing or at premium advertising spaces at affiliate sites;
4) providing a conduit for pushing the time-sensitive content to international affiliates;
5) increasing high quality traffic for the partner sites;
6) increasing the prices that the partners can charge for advertising space because of the increased high quality traffic;
7) providing transparency in accounting; and
8) providing fraud accounting protection.
Payment to the third party aggregator may come from the originator of the time-sensitive content, or the partners. The third party aggregator may then share the revenue with the affiliates. The search engine providers may share in the revenue based on at least one payment method selected from a group comprising: 1) cost per thousand impressions (CPM); 2) pay-per-click (PPC); and 3) fixed fee.
Further, certain embodiments teach a variety of mechanisms for generating and reformatting time-sensitive digital content for maximum exposure on the connected networked media, such as the Internet. Such mechanisms include those by which digital content is properly formatted and pushed out to the and thus displayed substantially immediately by search engines as paid results (PPC, for example). Other aspects include mechanisms for ensuring digital content is featured prominently on web sites of search engine providers. For example, in certain embodiments, there are mechanisms by which a search for eclassifieds results in relevant text listings, banners, pop up windows, pop up under exit consoles, etc.
As an illustrative, non-limiting example, the time-sensitive content may take the form of an eclassified. The original content may be submitted by a user via legacy newspaper storage systems, converted to an eclassified, or electronic forms and/or via a web interface, and this text may subsequently be reformatted by applications, local processes, or other software. Such software may be configured to reformat the content into a form suitable for direct feeding to search sites in response to a search query.
As will be appreciated, embodiments of the invention can be responsive to digital content in any available format. Typical formats used for digital content in this context include plain text, such as ASCII, encoded markup languages such as HTML, and specialized encoding languages such as those used by eclassified providers and newspaper production systems. In some embodiments, the content may be customized for particular search engines, such that the content is featured prominently by such search engines when certain search terms are presented to the search engine. These and other embodiments are described in greater detail infra.
The invention includes embodiments particularly suited for timely digital content, which loses relevance over time. Given the time-sensitivity of the content, immediate access of such materials by web surfers are imperative to the content holder, and the invention supports automated techniques for reformatting and distributing such content to address these requirements.
An exemplar of such time-sensitive content is presented by eclassified advertisements. Typically, Internet-based eclassifieds are posted to sites supporting such ads, and these type of advertisements are rarely indexed by search engines, if at all, in a timely fashion. Moreover, such advertisements are often lost in a myriad of search results offered by typical search sites. As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, eclassifieds are but one example of such time-sensitive content, any many other examples shall be readily apparent to one skilled in the relevant arts.
A advertiser through a variety of mechanisms may submit the time-sensitive digital content 100, such as an eclassified. These input mechanisms include a form presented via a web interface, legacy eclassified advertisement production systems, and third party eclassified brokers. These input mechanisms are made available to the advertiser through the advertiser computer 104. The data is then stored as digital content in any suitable format, and then made available over the web through a source such as the eclassified website 116 or the online newspaper website 118. Typical formats for storing digital content in this context include plain text format as entered by the advertiser, such as ASCII, encoded markup languages such as HTML, and specialized encoding languages such as those used by eclassified providers and newspaper production systems.
The format engine 106 is operable to convert the digital content, as input by the advertiser or as formatted by the eclassified provider/distributor, into a specified “push” format well suited for direct feeding, by XML feed for example, to search engines such as search engines 112 and 114, in response to a search query by a web surfer.
The push engine 108 operates on the push formatted digital content so that such content can be directly fed to search engines, such as search engines 106108, in response to search queries submitted on the search engine sites. The push engine 108 may be further operable to present the digital content to the search engines such that the digital content is featured prominently when certain search terms are presented to the search engine.
The monetization engine 110 attends to any necessary accounting associated with the format and push processes. As will be appreciated, the service of formatting and pushing digital content into search engine indexes for prominent display can readily be monetized by any third party aggregator providing these services. Payment for these services may come directly from the advertiser. More likely, eclassified distributors (partner sites) will pay the third party for distribution of large blocks of eclassifieds, the cost of this being passed onto the advertiser indirectly either hidden in the basic advertising cost or as an extra feature. Third party aggregators will be described below in more detail with reference to
According to certain embodiments, a third party aggregator acts as an independent service provider implementing certain aspects of some embodiments on a global scale. One method for implementing a third party aggregator is described in more detail below with reference to
The method 200 begins in a step 202 where the third party aggregator receives a search query form an affiliate site. According to one embodiment, the search query is in the form of an XML feed. At step 204, the third party aggregator checks the third party aggregator's internal database for search results that will satisfy the search query. If the third party aggregator does not find such search results, at step 206, the third party aggregator then attempts to pull such content from partner sites.
In a step 208, the third party aggregator converts the digital content into the requested push format. The push format may take on a variety of forms. For example, certain embodiments contemplate generating title, description, and URL elements. The push format may include other elements such as IP address information element, and key word search element. The data found at the linking URL might provide a web page, a pop up window, or perhaps the URL indirects to the original source of the eclassified or some data. One method for generating push formatted eclassifieds is described below in more detail with reference to
In a step 210, the third party aggregator pushes the formatted search results to the affiliate site that sent the search query to the third party aggregator. At this point the substantive portion of the transaction has been completed. In a step 212, the third party aggregator monetizes the successfully completed transaction. Monetization may take on a variety of forms. For example, the third party aggregator may perform account management for revenue sharing in the event the web surfer clicks through to the ecclassied (in a PPC model). Alternatively, the third party aggregator may update a database for periodic billing, or update of a database for later accounting.
After the monetization step 212, the third party aggregator performs any necessary housekeeping functions. For example, in some embodiments usage statistics are maintained in a third party aggregator database. Additionally, a receipt and other transaction information may be transmitted to affiliates and partners.
Turning next to
A step 250 pulls a data file of eclassifieds in a format specified by the third party aggregator client. A step 252 determines the format of the eclassified data file in order to properly parse and format the file. A step 254 retrieves pertinent data from each eclassified present in the eclassified file. This data will include pricing, product or service, source of origin of the eclassified, contact data, etc. One suitable method for implementing step 254 is described below in more detail with reference to
Continuing with
With reference to
In embodiments of the invention, the conversion engine may be resident on servers 104 remote from the user entering the text of the eclassified ad. In some such embodiments, the conversion engine is in communication with the user via a web browser linked to the servers operating the conversion engine via HTTP, or an equivalent networking protocol. As a non-limiting example, the engine may be triggered by a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) daemon engaged after receipt of user commands at a server remotely linked to the user. In alternative embodiments, the conversion engine may be a process at least partially resident on a terminal 102 employed by the user for entry of the text of the eclassified ad. By way of non-limiting example, the conversion engine may be at least partially contained as an executable on a web browser, such as a plug-in. Alternatively, the conversion engine may operate locally to the user, in the form of a scripting language such as JavaScript® of Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, Calif.
Upon conversion, the advertisement is encoded in a markup language in a specialized format. The markup language may include HTML, XML, SGML, or other markup language. The conversion engine may include separate customizations targeted to distinct search engines.
Note that the algorithms and techniques described above are for illustrative purposes only, and many alternatives shall be apparent to those skilled in the art. In particular, those skilled in the art shall recognize that eclassifieds are but one example of time-sensitive content whose exposure can be maximized by the techniques described herein. The invention is equally applicable to any other sort of time sensitive content, illustrative, non-limiting examples of which include public notices, news articles, and myriad other examples that shall be apparent to those skilled in the art.
The present application claims the benefit of pending U.S. Provisional Application No. ______, filed Sep. 3, 2004, by Gary Kremen and is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60607212 | Sep 2004 | US |
