Unified Story Ranking via Conversion Factor
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Solution Overview
Problem
Social networking systems lack robust mechanisms for controlling the context of advertisements, affecting their effectiveness, and conventional methods complicate the selection of organic and sponsored stories due to different valuation methods.
Innovation Solution
A social networking system combines sponsored and organic stories using a conversion factor to convert scores into a common unit of measurement, allowing for direct comparison and simplifying the selection process, while dynamically adjusting the conversion factor to regulate the mix of content presented to users.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If sponsored stories and organic stories use different valuation methods, then each story type can be optimized independently, but the selection process becomes complicated and inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The patent transforms the valuation of sponsored stories from a revenue-based metric to an engagement-based metric (affinity score), matching the valuation approach for organic stories. This parameter change enables unified comparison and selection of both story types using the same criteria, simplifying the selection process while maintaining optimization capability.
2Reliability
If ads are displayed in isolation from other content, then ad targeting can be precise, but ad effectiveness decreases due to lack of context
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges sponsored stories with organic stories into a unified newsfeed stream, allowing ads to appear in the context of genuine user content. This integration provides the contextual environment that enhances ad effectiveness while maintaining precise targeting through the affinity score-based selection mechanism.
3Productivity
If the newsfeed contains only organic stories, then user experience is maintained, but revenue generation from advertisers is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the selection parameter from purely organic engagement signals to a unified affinity score system that evaluates both organic and sponsored stories on the same engagement metrics. This allows sponsored stories to compete fairly with organic content for newsfeed placement, ensuring that ads appear only when they meet the same quality thresholds as user-generated content, thus protecting user experience while enabling revenue generation.
Data Source
AI summary
A social networking system (SNS) provides sponsored stories and organic stories about actions taken by other SNS users to a viewing user. Organic stories are selected based on the likelihood the viewing user is interested in their content. While advertisers compensate the SNS for presentation of sponsored stories, the sponsored stories also include information about actions by other SNS users. To increase the likelihood the viewing user interacts with sponsored stories, a common communication channel is used to present both the sponsored stories and the organic stories. To simplify selection of organic stories and sponsored stories, the SNS determines a common unit of measurement for both and makes selections based on the common unit of measurement.