Most advertising you see online is for stuff you can buy… well… online. Be they basketballs, beauty supplies or body part enhancers, prevailing wisdom leads us to believe that online advertisers don't want you to get off your duff to buy their stuff.

Some businesses are changing that model. As more data is available from your Internet surfing habits--and as the nature of online advertising changes--it's possible to target advertising based on where one lives. Two such examples are the sites Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com, and they both try to get you in the doors of businesses you actually live next to.

With Living Social, you choose a city and receive a daily email with a deeply discounted deal specific to that city. You can then choose to buy them, and if you get three other people to do the same, you get yours for free.

With Groupon, there's also one deal per city per day, and you can choose whether or not to buy into them… the catch is that the deal isn't on until a certain number of people agree to it. So if a deal needs 50 people to buy in for the day and only 35 do, you don't pay a dime and you don't get the deal.

As the Internet becomes a more personal experience, it seems advertisers are finding closer-to-home ways to separate our cash from our wallets... and it's not always such a bad thing.

--Brandon

Photo taken from this photostream and used with permission of a Creative Commons license.

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