Supporting Advertisement on Electronic Publications

Supporting Advertisement on Electronic Publications

      Advertisements is one of the key revenues for free and paid
publications/periodicals.  In this disclosure, an innovation is
devised to support advertisement in Cyberspace when magazines are
published electronically on the Internet.

      On paper magazines, the advertisements are inserted to printed
pages.  Reader request cards are usually provided for the readers to
request more detail information for the products/companies.  A
combination of the circulation count and the number of received
reader request cards serves the purpose of defining advertising fee
schedule and giving feedback to advertising companies on how
effectiveness the ad is on that magazine.

      As the electronic publication becomes prevailing in today's
cyberspace, it is inevitable that the magazines/periodicals on papers
will be eventually published 'electronically'.  The electronic
magazines and periodicals will need to run advertisements, as the
paper magazines  do, to support its financial needs, especially for
the ones that is free  to the subscribers and some of the magazines
that the subscribers need  to paid a fee.  This disclosure provides
means for running advertisement  on electronic publications and
devises an algorithm on tracking the circulation count and
effectiveness of the advertisement.

      In this disclosure, it is proposed that an ad will be embedded
in an electronic page in a way exactly the same as that on a paper
publication.  The ad can be an image in Graphical Image Format (GIF)
or any other formats generally supported by a net browser, such as
Netscape, Mosaic, and so on.  Associated with the ad image is a
hypertext field that will link to a home page for the product/company
when the field is clicked.

      Three types of counters are adopted to track the number of
accesses to the publications.  The C1 magazine-access counter is
incremented every time the el...