Deliver maximum value to website publishers with minimal impact on workflow and production cost.

Acceptance of BannerBean by leading web publishers is critical to its success. Therefore, BannerBean's value proposition to publishers is equally critical — BannerBean must increase advertising revenue while minimally impacting cost and workflow. To serve this goal, BannerBean's insertion procedure is designed for maximum simplicity using existing tools. Additionally, BannerBean is fully accountable — publishers may provide BannerBean free of charge, and only clickthroughs delivered by BannerBean are subject to a revenue sharing agreement.

The user interface must not visually compromise advertising nor introduce its own branding.

Publishers, advertisers, and ad services will not accept a visual element that compromises the impact of their ads. Likewise, publishers will require that any sitewide control blend seamlessly into their site layouts. BannerBean's user control and its configuration options have been painstakingly designed to satisfy these requirements.

The user interface must be instantly understandable and usable on the first click.

BannerBean's interface is based on navigational tools common to all web browsers — the back button, next button, and history list. With a single click, any site visitor can immediately understand, operate, and receive results from the BannerBean user interface. Most importantly, all results appear at the user's point of control — within the display area of the ad associated with the BannerBean.

Ads viewed on multiple Internet access devices will be automatically combined in a user's history.

Users often operate a variety of computers and other Internet enabled devices in their daily lives. BannerBean's one-time login feature enables those users to associate each browser they use with their personal ad histories in the BannerBean database. Thus, an ad viewed by a user at work will be found in a BannerBean on his or her home computer, laptop, cell phone, etc.

The privacy of users must be protected.

BannerBean's success depends upon acceptance by users. Users' confidence in BannerBean's privacy protection is essential to gaining that acceptance. To ensure users' privacy, the cookie-based identification stored in each user's web browser includes only a randomly generated ID to an anonymous ad history in BannerBean's database. No personal information is maintained in either the cookie or the database. When multi-browser operation is enabled, the login and password supplied by a user is simply a means to assign the user's anonymous ID to additional web browsers.