System and method for estimating prevalence of digital content on the World-Wide-Web

Abstract

The present invention is a system, method, and computer program product for tracking and measuring digital content that is distributed on a computer network such as the Internet. The system collects online advertisement data, analyzes the data, and uses the data to calculate measurements of the prevalence of those advertisements. The system processes raw traffic data by cleansing and summarizing the traffic data prior to storing the processed data in a database. An advertisement sampling system uses site selection and definition criteria and a probe map to retrieve Web pages from the Internet, extract advertisements from those Web pages, classify each advertisement, and store the data in a database. A statistical summarization system accesses the processed raw traffic data and the advertisement data in the database to calculate advertising prevalence statistics including the advertising frequency, impressions, and spending.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] The present application claims priority from, and incorporates by reference, the provisional application for letters patent, No. 60 / 175,665, filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Jan. 12, 2000, and provisional application for letters patent, No. 60 / 231,195, filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Sep. 7, 2000.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] The present invention relates generally to a system, method, and computer program product for tracking and measuring digital content that is distributed on a computer network such as the Internet. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system, method, and computer program product that collects online advertisement data, analyzes the data, and uses the data to calculate measurements of the prevalence of those advertisements. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] The increase in the popularity of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web (“Web”) is due, in part...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010] The advertisement sampling system, also known as the “prober” or “Cloudprober”, use a robust methodology that continually seek out the most significant and influential Web sites to probe (i.e., monitor). Moreover, the site selection and definition performed by the present invention dictates the Web pages that comprise each Web site to ensure that complete, singularly branded entities are reported as such. The advertisement sampling system uses intelligent agent technology to retrieve Web pages at various frequencies to obtain a representative sample. This allows the Cloudprober to accurately assess how frequently each advertisement appears in the traffic data. After the Cloudprober fetches a Web page, the advertisement sampling system extracts the advertisements from the Web page. In the preferred embodiment, the advertisement extractor, also known as the “extractor”, invokes an automatic advertisement detection (“AAD”) process, a heuristic extraction process, to automatically extract all of the advertisements from the Web page.

[0011] Following extraction of the advertisements from the Web page, the advertisement sampling system invokes a classification engine to analyze the advertisement fragments. The classifier processes each fragment to determine a classification for the fragment and then stores the fragment and classification data in a database. The result of the analyses and processing performed by the advertisement sampling system is a rich catalog of advertising activity that can be easily queried by a client.

[0012] The present invention uses a Web front end and user interface to access and update the data in the database. The Web front end provides a client, or user, of the present invention with a query interface to the database populated by the traffic analysis, advertisement sampling, and the statistical summarization systems. The user interface is a graphical user interface that includes a separate component for system account management, site administration, taxonomy administration, advertising content classification, and rate card collection. The user interface allows an account manager and operator to maintain and administer the present invention. The user interface also allows a media editor to review the data in the database to verify the accuracy and integrity of the vast amount of data collected by the present invention. This data integrity process routinely investigates unusual or outlying data points to calibrate the system and adapt it to an ever-changing environment.

Problems solved by technology

Several traditional measurement methodologies produce useful statistics about the Internet and its users, but the complexity of the Internet has left some of these methodologies unable to answer many important questions.

Online advertising is one area where traditional methodologies do not lend well to measurement.

Existing advertisement tracking and measurement systems automate the collection of Web pages, but fail to automate the collection of the online advertisements.

The existing advertisement tracking and measurement systems fail to meet these needs because they are not optimized for resource allocation and do not continuously sample relevant Web pages in the correct proportion.

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