Today internet advertising is sold by web sites to advertisers, and delivered to the internet users according to the figure below:

Todays internet advertising methods

Web sites do try to target ads according to the locality of the site visitor. However, web sites that are wishing to tap into the local advertising market cannot know the origin and the consumer characteristics of their visitors in any detail and certainty. So they end up serving up ads that are completely useless most of the time.

The crux of the problem lies in the way internet advertising is practiced today. Under current practices, ads are embedded in the web content at source (the web sites). It is obvious that if the source is in California, USA, and the content is delivered to Bologna, Italy, the advertisement that was included in California would be totally irrelevant for the person in Bologna who sees it.

The practice of embedding the ad at source is certainly not effective, and should be viewed as a “child disease” of the internet, set to overcome. In any other media, the ad is inserted in the content at the point of delivery.

The developed system permits the insertion of ads in web content at the ISP level (the point of delivery). This process is depicted below:

The developed system

The advantage of the developed system is that it can have accurate and detailed information on the geographic origin of users and thus adapt the ads that are displayed to them based on this information.

The process of inserting ads at the ISP level seems rational and easy to implement, but there were certainly many technical issues to resolve. We had been working on these issues for the last year, and we have developed a prototype solution, depicted below:

System Architecture

Quick explanation:

• The user connects to the system via a Squid authentication
• The HTTP request made along with the Username is sent to the redirector
• Using the GET function from Perl, the redirector 'requests' the page from the www
• The redirector checks if the page code allows us to add a locally targeted banner, and if the DB has any suitable banners (based on user location and profile)
• If the page is not modified (either because the page did not allow it, or because there were no suitable banners in the DB), the original page is sent to Squid. Squid then serves it to the user
• If the page was modified, the new modified version of the page that was requested is saved in a temp folder under htdocs and Apache serves it to the user

Please don't hesitate to contact us and request more information about the system.