Towards real time contextual advertising

Abstract

The practice of placement of advertisements on a target webpage which are relevant to the page’s subject matter is called contextual advertising. Placement of such ads can lead to an improved user experience and increased revenue to the webpage owner, advertisement network and advertiser. The selection of these advertisements is done online by the advertisement network. Empirically, we have found that such advertisements are rendered later than the other content of the webpage which lowers the quality of the user experience and lessens the impact of the ads. We propose an offline method of contextual advertising where a website is classified into a particular category according to a given taxonomy. Upon a request from any web page under its domain, an advertisement is served from the pool of advertisements which are also classified according to the taxonomy. Experiments suggest that this approach is a viable alternative to the current form of contextual advertising.