Targeted advertising for online social networks

Generating targeted advertisements for online social networks is a problem of growing interest. Monetizing activity in online social networks has been the topic of heated discussion lately. The undiscriminating tastes and spending power of a majority of its members makes this medium for self-expression and opinion sharing a very lucrative venue for advertising. The recent $240 million investment by Microsoft in Facebook clearly reaffirms the opportunity in targeted advertising for online social networks. Content-targeted advertisement programs such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Contextual Match work by automatically spotting keywords in web pages and displaying ads based on the keywords. The displayed ads are also refereed as Contextual Advertisements. These ads are generally represented by a URL along with a textual description that is also used to match the ad with the target page. This model works relatively well on the Web but its applicability to social networks is being met with some important challenges. User activity on venues such as forums, marketplaces and groups on social networking sites are excellent targets for monetization. We present an algorithm based on keyword clustering to generate targeted ads.