Gravity and Content Personalization

Have you ever been to a website and see advertisements that have nothing to do with your personal interests? Let's pretend you're a woman between the ages of 18-32 on a gossip website when you suddenly see an ad for Viagra. The likelihood that 1. you will take action and click on the ad or 2. have any interest or connection to Viagra is incredibly slim. 

How does advertising combat this? By dropping a cookie on your IP address when you scroll around the web, advertising organizations are able to categorize users and retarget them with ads that are relevant and timely. 

Aol is taking website personalization to the next level with the recent acquisition of Gravity. Gravity is a content personalization engine that will provide site viewers with articles that are calculated to be more interesting to the user. Gravity, bundled with the 2010 acquisition of The Huffington Post, will allow Aol to provide a customized Internet browsing experience that focuses on customized content as well as advertisements.

How does it work?
Gravity has created a patented technology that calculates the type of information that might be of interest to a specific user. Gravity crawls, indexes and analyzes each web page, tweet, status update or post to surface the most relevant content for the user.

Why is it unique?
Gravity has created The Interest Graph, which gathers data on a user's web browsing history to aid in categorizing the type of content that user prefers. Most organizations have broad targeting capabilities that bundle users based on internet habits, but the partnership between Aol and Gravity will index content by type of interest at scale.

The Interest Graph:
Check out the live interest graph here!