Optimal advertising on a two-dimensional web banner

Abstract

The rapid growth and proliferation of internet based services has opened up new avenues of interactions and corresponding business models. Advertisements shown within websites form a major source of revenue for web publishers. Naturally, the proper planning and allocation of advertisement space in the webpages becomes a major factor in the profitability of the business model. This paper addresses the problem of determining efficient placement of advertisements on a two-dimensional web banner with the objective of maximizing revenue. An integer programming mathematical model is developed here to optimally place advertisements on a two-dimensional banner. The performance of the new formulation is compared with models existing in the recent literature. The proposed model is also validated with computational analysis to prove its efficacy.