DOMAIN CLASSIFICATION AND CONTENT DELIVERY

• US 20100280903A1
• Filed: 04/30/2009
• Published: 11/04/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 04/30/2009
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: BON, JOOST MARTIJN, HUI, DENISE DARE, SCHACKWITZ, MICHAEL DIETRICH, DI NICOLA, VINCENZO MARIA, FU, SHENGYU, ZIGMAN, ERIK, BARLIN, DAVID, KUNZ, MICHAEL CLIFFORD, HOLDSWORTH, BRIAN DAVID, WRIGHT, RICHARD EDWARD, GJONEJ, GERARD
• Application Number:
  US12/432,831
• Publication Number:
  US 20100280903A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/14.58
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0261 based on user location
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0269 based on user profile or attribute
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/214 using selective forwarding

Abstract

Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for categorizing sender domains are provided. An advertisement platform includes targeting components, databases, mail servers, and client devices. Recipients interact with the client devices to receive electronic mail from the mail servers. The mail servers store records of sender domains where the recipient performed a specified action to a message having a sender domain. The mail server transmits a log of the sender domains, actions, and an anonymous identifier for the recipient to the targeting system. The targeting components extract the sender domains that are used by the advertisement platform to communicate to the database to retrieve advertisement categories that correspond to the sender domains. The advertisement categories are used by the advertisement platform to direct content, including advertisements, to the recipients via the anonymous identifier.

Claims

1. One or more computer-readable media storing computer-usable instructions that cause one or more processors to perform a method that identifies one or more advertiser categories for a sender domain, the method comprising:

receiving a log having sender domains;

extracting sender domains from the log;

transforming the extracted sender domains into full sender domains;

identifying one or more topics that correspond to each full sender domain; and

matching the one or more topics with advertiser categories via a taxonomy that maps the one or more topics to advertiser categories.

2. The media of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving an anonymous identifier (ANID) or personal user name and personal password for each recipient of an electronic mail from the sender domains.

3. The media of claim 2, further comprising:

inferring interests of recipients associated with each ANID based on the advertiser categories selected from matches in the taxonomy.

4. The media of claim 3, further comprising:

updating a profile corresponding with each ANID to include the inferred interests.

5. The media of claim 1, wherein the log includes an action performed by a recipient of the electronic mail.

6. The media of claim 5, wherein each action is assigned a weight and the actions are one of:

read, save, label, delete, junk, print, reply, forward, hover, spend a threshold amount of time reading, forward to a threshold number of people, move to another folder, tag, categorize, or print.

7. The media of claim 6, further comprising:

linking advertising categories to sender domains and weighting a link between each sender domain and a corresponding advertising category based on recipient action and assigned weight, wherein the weight is increased if a recipient reads and forwards an electronic mail from the sender domain as opposed to read only.

8. The media of claim 6, wherein transforming the extracted sender domains into full sender domains further comprises:

searching for web pages corresponding to the sender domains.

9. The media of claim 7, wherein the topic is included in the web pages corresponding to the sender domains.

10. A computer-implemented method to target advertisements based on sender domains received by an advertisement platform, the method comprising:

recording, at one or more mail servers, a sender domain for each message received by each client device that displays the received messages to recipients that read the message;

receiving, from the client device, an anonymous identifier (ANID) for each authenticated recipient at the one or more mail servers; and

transmitting the recorded sender domains and corresponding ANID from the one or more mail servers to the advertisement platform.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the client device is a computer, gaming station, or some other computing device configured to connect to the mail server.

12. The method of claim 10, further comprising:

receiving, at the one or more mail servers, actions taken by the client device.

13. The method of claim 10, wherein the ANID allows the client device to receive advertisements, in realtime, across various applications linked to the advertisement platform.

14. The method of claim 10, wherein the advertisement platform identifies a category for the sender domain without accessing the content of the message, infers additional data corresponding to interests of the recipient, and updates a profile associated with each ANID.

15. An advertisement system, the advertisement system comprising:

one or more databases communicatively connected to one or more targeting systems, the one or more databases configured to store relationships between sender domains and advertiser categories;

one or more electronic mail servers communicatively connected to the one or more targeting systems, the one or more electronic mail servers configured to provide e-mails to an authenticated recipient via an e-mail client executing on a client device, and recording sender domains for e-mails read by the recipient; and

the one or more targeting systems configured to receive a log having sender domains recorded by each of the one or more e-mail servers, the one or more targeting systems further configured to determine relevance of each sender domain in the log to a plurality of advertisement categories stored in the one or more databases.

16. The advertisement system of claim 15, wherein the one or more databases includes a taxonomy that maps a sender domain to one or more advertiser categories.

17. The advertisement system of claim 15, wherein each client device stores an anonymous identifier (ANID) for each recipient.

18. The advertisement system of claim 17, wherein the one or more electronic mail servers stores the ANID in the log along with the sender domain and an action performed by the recipients of messages having the sender domain.

19. The advertisement system of claim 18, wherein sender domains in the log include sender domains included on a safe list managed by the recipient.

20. The advertisement system of claim 17, wherein the one or more targeting systems determine relevance of the sender domain and corresponding advertiser categories based on an observed frequency of the sender domain in the log.