Method of auctioning advertising opportunities of uncertain availability

摘要

A method of quickly and efficiently determining pricing and allocation of advertising messages in a diversity of documents to be presented to a diversity of users with varying degrees of targeting information known about them. A database of individual users' profiles is maintained. Profiles may contain information about users' demographics, interests, and behavior patterns. Advertisers place bids on reaching users. Bids are collected and stored until a user requests a document that can be combined with an advertising message to be presented to user. Then, different bids of reaching that user are compared to determine the winning bid, serve the advertising message, and to determine the price to be paid by the winning advertiser. Means are provided to make bids react dynamically on the content of the requested documents and on the overall schedule of reaching users repeatedly, to discount bids if advertising message is likely to be undesirable, and to allocate advertising messages into documents provided by third parties.