Patent ID: 8271878

Claim:
A system, comprising: an e-commerce web site that hosts an electronic catalog of items, said e-commerce web site configured to at least partially implement an affiliates program in which affiliates that operate affiliate web sites are paid commissions for user referrals that result in purchases from the electronic catalog; an event recording system that records events associated with user actions performed across a plurality of web sites, including said e-commerce site and said affiliate web sites, an association mining system that uses the recorded events to detect behavioral associations that associate particular web sites of said plurality of web sites, and/or particular pages of said web sites, with particular catalog items in the electronic catalog; and a content generation system configured to receive, from a user computing device that has loaded a web page of an affiliate web site, a request for content to display on said web page, and to respond to the request by at least (1) selecting, based at least partly on a behavioral association detected by the association mining system, at least one catalog item to present on said page, and (2) transmitting, from a server of the content generation system to the user computing device, a content object that includes a description of said catalog item and a link to a corresponding catalog page of said electronic catalog of the e-commerce web site, said link encoded with affiliate identification information for tracking a resulting user referral, said content generation system being separate from the affiliate web site.