Ad-Heat Advertising Patent Watch

Google+ launched 2 years ago with much skepticism. Was it going to be the Facebook killer, or would it be another social fumble like Buzz or Wave?

For the most part, people have accepted Google+ as a major social network – certainly in the top 3. And whenever you have a busy social network, the next question is, “How does one monetize that captive audience?” Well, today we look at a patent that lays out how Google plans on doing just that.

Google’s Ad-Heat Advertising Patent

It’s officially entitled, “ADHEAT ADVERTISMENT MODEL FOR SOCIAL NETWORK”.

The idea behind the patent is to help brands get their ad in front of Influencers. Those Influencers are then meant to share that ad with their followers, while the Influencer who shared the ad splits the revenue with Google.

It’s similar to YouTube’s profit sharing program where top YouTubers get a cut of the ads that are shown on their videos. But instead of paying a YouTuber to create a video they can run ads against, Google wants to pay active Google+’ers to distribute ads to their followers. It works as follows…

The Process

When an advertiser wants to run an ad on Google+, they first need to find Influencers. They do this by submitting keyword base criteria to Google.

For example, an advertiser may say, “I’m looking for a stay at home mom whose interests include cooking, fitness and listens to country music”. Google will dig through their massive collection of user profiles to pull out a few thousand Google+ users who match that profile.

Sorting each person by “Influence” score, Google will then ask the advertiser to bid on which Influencers the ad should appear to. The more Influential the user, the higher the asking bid.

Factoring in bid prices, competition, relevance and quality metrics, Google shows the ad to the targeted Influencer as a sponsored post in their Google+ news feed. Should that Influencer decide to share the post with their followers, they can share a portion of the revenue Google gets when their followers click on the ad.

Watch the full recording of the Ad-Heat Advertising Patent Watch recording here:

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