System and method for finding and prioritizing content based on user specific interest profiles

A personalized content delivery computer system is provided comprising:

• (a) at least one computing device, and
• (b) a content interest profile and a content matching utility executable by the computing device;
• wherein the content interest profile builder and content matching utility are linked so as to enable users of the platform interested in targeting (“targeting user”) one or more other users (the “consumers”), using content that is likely to be of interest to the consumer;
• wherein the content interest profile builder includes an inference engine that (i) intelligently collects content interest parameters for the consumer, by extracting from one or more target entities associated with the consumer, such as a profile maintained by or for the consumer or articles or documents associated with the consumer, one or more data elements that are relevant to content interest, and that (ii) analyzes the data elements so as to construct, including iteratively, a content interest profile that includes a series of topics that the consumer is substantially likely to have a significant interest in;
• wherein the content matching utility is responsive to a request to target the consumer with content likely to be of significant interest to the consumer by analyzing a collection of content items within an information domain that is relevant to the consumer based on their content interest profile (“candidate entity collection”) so as to predict a subset of content items from the candidate entity collection that are most likely to be of significant interest to the consumer (“matched entities”), and generate a list of such matched entities.