A goal programming model for advertisement selection on online news media

Abstract

Promotion plays an important role in determining success of a product/ service. Out of the many mediums available, promotion through means of advertisements is most effective and is most commonly used. Due to increasing popularity of the Internet, advertisers yearn for placing their ads on web. Consequently, web advertising has become one of the major sources of income for many websites. Several websites provide free services to the users and generate revenue by placing ads on its webpages. Advertisement for any product/service is placed on the site considering various aspects such as webpage selection, customer demography, product category, page, slot, time, etc. Further, different advertisers bid different costs to place their ads on a particular rectangular slot of a webpage, that is, many ads compete with each other for their placement on a specific position. Hence, in order to maximize the revenue generated through the ads, optimal placement of ads becomes imperative. In this paper, we formulate an advertisement planning problem for web news mediamaximizing their revenue. Mathematical programming approach is used to solve the problem. A case study is presented in the paper to show the application of the problem.