Patent ID: 7844488

Claim:
A method for advertising, comprising: receiving, by an advertising server, an advertisement request from a user node, wherein said advertisement request is automatically transmitted based upon a link sent from an affiliate node to said user node in response to a content request sent from said user node to said affiliate node; and selecting, in response to said advertisement request, an advertisement for delivery to the user node based upon stored information about said user node, wherein selecting an advertisement includes: determining whether selection criteria associated with advertisements are satisfied based upon the stored information; and calculating, if the selection criteria associated with more than one advertisement are satisfied, a satisfaction index for each advertisement; and selecting the advertisement with the lowest satisfaction index, wherein the satisfaction index for an advertisement is at least one of: directly proportional to the number of times the advertisement has been sent to a user node and the total amount of time over which the advertisement is permitted to be sent to a user node, and inversely proportional to the amount of time expired since the advertisement was first permitted to be sent to a user node and inversely proportional to the maximum number of times the advertisement is permitted to be sent to a user node.