Title
Optimal Allocation Of Ad Inventory In Real-Time Bidding Advertising Markets
Abstract
With the rapid development of big data analytics in online marketing, real-time bidding (RTB) has emerged as a promising business model in recent years and now becomes one of the major online advertising channels. Based on analysis of Web Cookies, RTB platforms are able to precisely identify the features and preferences of target audiences visiting publishers' websites, and forward the information to competing advertisers submitting bids for their best-matched audience in real-time ad auctions. As the supplier of ad impressions, publishers typically have multiple channels to sell their ad impressions (i.e., ad inventory), making their strategies for allocating ad inventory one of the most critical research problems. In this paper, we strive to study publishers' optimal strategy of allocating ad inventory across online channel of RTB-based auctions and offline channel prevailingly realized in the form of guaranteed contracts. Considering the ad reserve price as the control variable, we establish the optimization model. We also explicitly take the default penalty in offline channels into consideration, so as to balance the short-term online revenue and long-term offline revenue. In our work, we analyze altogether three kinds of strategies for publishers to allocate their ad inventory in pursuit of the optimal strategy, and validate our model and analysis via computational experiments. We find that there is no dominant strategy that can outperform others in all cases, and interestingly, publishers using the hybrid-channel strategy do not always gain more revenues than those using the single-channel strategy.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2016
2016 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS (SMC)
real-time bidding, guaranteed contract, publisher, ad inventory allocation, ad impression
Field
DocType
ISSN
Revenue,Reservation price,Advertising,Computer science,Online advertising,Strategic dominance,Common value auction,Real-time bidding,Business model,Bidding
Conference
1062-922X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Juanjuan Li101.01
Xiaochun Ni2273.00
Yong Yuan323931.09
Rui Qin46510.85
Fei-Yue Wang55273480.21