Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks

In this work, we investigate techniques to monitize user activity on public forums, marketplaces and groups on social network sites. Our approach involves (a) identifying the monetization potential of user posts and (b) eliminating offtopic content in monetizable posts to use the most relevant keywords for advertising. Our first user study involving 30 users and data from MySpace and Facebook, shows that 52% of ad impressions shown after using our system were more targeted compared to the 30% relevant impressions generated without using our system. A second smaller study suggests that profile ads that are based on user activity generate more interest than ads solely based on profile information.