Optimizing Trade-offs Among Stakeholders in Real-Time Bidding by Incorporating Multimedia Metrics
This addresses the imbalance in stakeholder benefits in online advertising, offering a novel approach for publishers to enhance long-term engagement and revenue, though it is incremental in extending existing auction models.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing trade-offs among all stakeholders (publisher, advertiser, user) in real-time bidding by incorporating multimedia metrics, proposing a two-stage computational framework that re-ranks ads to balance benefits, with results showing the publisher can significantly improve other stakeholders' benefits by slightly reducing short-term revenue.
Displaying banner advertisements (in short, ads) on webpages has usually been discussed as an Internet economics topic where a publisher uses auction models to sell an online user's page view to advertisers and the one with the highest bid can have her ad displayed to the user. This is also called \emph{real-time bidding} (RTB) and the ad displaying process ensures that the publisher's benefit is maximized or there is an equilibrium in ad auctions. However, the benefits of the other two stakeholders -- the advertiser and the user -- have been rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose a two-stage computational framework that selects a banner ad based on the optimized trade-offs among all stakeholders. The first stage is still auction based and the second stage re-ranks ads by considering the benefits of all stakeholders. Our metric variables are: the publisher's revenue, the advertiser's utility, the ad memorability, the ad click-through rate (CTR), the contextual relevance, and the visual saliency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that optimizes trade-offs among all stakeholders in RTB by incorporating multimedia metrics. An algorithm is also proposed to determine the optimal weights of the metric variables. We use both ad auction datasets and multimedia datasets to validate the proposed framework. Our experimental results show that the publisher can significantly improve the other stakeholders' benefits by slightly reducing her revenue in the short-term. In the long run, advertisers and users will be more engaged, the increased demand of advertising and the increased supply of page views can then boost the publisher's revenue.