Facebook applies for ad-targeting patent
This is interesting: Earlier this month, Facebook filed for a patent to further hone its ad-targeting technology so that ads can be based on what a user's friends interests may be. The reason for this, it appears, is so that Facebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing is the third step in a line Facebook has been walking since its 2007 plan to get personal with ad targeting and the advanced ad-targeting features announced in March 2009. What changes here is legal posture: rather than just shipping another targeting feature, Facebook is claiming the underlying method — inferring what ads suit a user from that user's friends' interests — as intellectual property.
The timing is awkward by accident. In the same week Facebook disclosed that some platform developers inadvertently shared User IDs through a browser issue (while reporting no evidence of resulting harm), launched Places-powered Deals with partner businesses, and teased a mobile-focused event — so a patent on friend-derived ad signals lands squarely inside an ongoing argument about where the line sits between shared social data and commercial use.
First-order effects
- Advertisers on Facebook gain a prospective new lever — campaigns aimed at users via their friends' declared interests — while the patent application itself stakes Facebook's claim over that method before rivals can build around it.
Second-order effects
- Competing social networks and ad platforms working on social targeting face a choice between designing around Facebook's claimed method or risking infringement disputes, and privacy advocates gain fresh ammunition at exactly the moment the User ID-sharing disclosure keeps data-handling practices in view.
Third-order effects
- If granted and enforced, patents of this kind would make the social graph a defensible asset class — shifting competition in social advertising from who has the most users to who holds the rights to infer intent from connections between them, with regulators likely to weigh in on whether friend data is fair game for targeting at all.
The trend: Ad targeting is migrating from self-declared profile attributes toward signals inferred from a user's social network, and Facebook is using the patent system to lock down that territory.