Ad insertion in automatically composed documents

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatically inserting advertisements (ads) into machine composed documents. We explicitly analyze the fundamental tradeoff between expected revenue due to ad insertion and the quality of the corresponding composed documents. We show that the optimal tradeoff a publisher can expect may be expressed as an efficient-frontier in the revenue-quality space. We develop algorithms to compose documents that lie on this optimal tradeoff frontier. These algorithms can automatically choose distributions of ad sizes and ad placement locations to optimize revenue for a given quality or optimize quality for given revenue. Such automation allows a market maker to accept highly personalized content from publishers who have no design or ad inventory management capability and distribute formatted documents to end users with aesthetic ad placement. The ad density/coverage may be controlled by the publisher or the end user on a per document basis by simply sliding along the tradeoff frontier. Business models where ad sales precede (ad-pull) or follow (ad-push) document composition are analyzed from a document engineering perspective.