Historically, large web search engines have sold advertising space based on keyword-driven search results. For example, Yahoo! conducts auctions for certain keywords, and the highest bidder(s) have their ads placed on pages containing Yahoo! search results, or they obtain preferred placement among the search results, i.e., at the top of the results list.
As web advertising develops, a number of companies are now acquiring large publisher bases from which they can sell advertisement placements. Specifically, Google is signing up publishers into their AdSense ad network. Advertisers pay Google to serve advertisements to participants of the AdSense network. Google then pays some or all of the advertising revenue to the individual publishers. For example, a publisher in the AdSense network may have an article on its website that talks about digital cameras, and Google's AdSense would display digital camera advertisements from advertisers in the AdSense network on that website. Google would auction off the “digital camera” keyword to advertisers in its AdSense network and display ads from the highest bidder(s).
There are a number of problems with this proprietary ad network model. First, companies that are building ad networks have an inherent conflict of interest because they represent both the publisher and the advertiser. Second, because there are multiple companies that are creating ad networks, advertisers have the burden of managing buys across many ad networks, which results in significant cost and complexity to the advertiser. Third, because publishers are for all practical purposes locked into a single ad network, the advertiser competition is limited, which results in lower return for the publishers. Fourth, the lack of general standards around terms and conditions, and behavioral segmentation is a major obstacle to reaching the full market value of online display advertising. There is also no current standardization across publishers for accepted media types and ad formats. Fifth, smaller publishers currently have very little power individually, even if they serve a hard-to-reach audience. Sixth, ISPs and other owners of large user databases are not realizing the full value of the information they have due to privacy concerns and lack of a proper marketplace. Finally, the types of participants and transactions possible are limited by the rigid framework of a proprietary ad network model. As a result, there is currently no way for a third party to intervene in an online advertising transaction, and share the risk of the result of the transaction with one or more participants of the transaction (e.g., the publisher, advertiser, or their representatives).
For instance, if one party is only willing to pay $1/impression, but a third party, due to unique insight on the transaction details (e.g., from statistical information, knowledge of a trend, pattern matching etc.), sees that the impressions will yield a lot more for the advertiser (e.g., which would typically cause an advertiser to bid $10 for the same impression), today, there is no way for the third party to share in the risk and reward of the transaction and monetize that insight.
Although certain concerns may be met by the rigid framework of a proprietary ad network model where a central entity can act to shield participants' activities from their competitors and keep end-user ad viewer details from the advertisers and publishers, as will be described in detail below, such concerns as preserving individual user privacy, shielding advertisers and publishers business data and decisions from competitors, and preserving propriety advertising exchange information can be met by the disclosed systems and methods while providing the benefits of third party participation in the exchange.
The above-described deficiencies of current advertising environments are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of today's advertising environments, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art may become further apparent upon review of the description of various non-limiting embodiments of the invention that follows.