Google Secures Patent for Location-Based Advertising

Last week was patent week, apparently, as both Facebook and Google were granted some pretty important patents. Facebook got a patent for its News Feed, certainly a useful one to own as a social network, and Google got a patent for location-based advertising, which could prove a very lucrative market in the coming years.

Google filed for the patent in 2004, when location-based advertising was mostly a futuristic and unknown concept. Since then, location has become much more important online, especially with the rise of Internet-enabled mobile devices. The patent is pretty general and covers a lot of bases, so it could prove a threat to plenty of companies out there.

Google has been very bullish about mobile advertising and location could play a very important role in this. The company and most experts believe that the market will grow rapidly in the coming years and is making sure it's covering it well. Google is in the process of acquiring AdMob, a mobile advertising company, and will pay $750 million for it, one of the biggest acquisitions as of late.

The company is not known for hoarding patents or for using them against other companies, so it is unlikely that it will have to enforce this one, but, if the war between Apple and Google heats up even more in the mobile space, there's no telling what would happen.

Here's a part of the patent's abstract: "The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information." [via Venture Beat]