Online allocation of display advertisements subject to advanced sales contracts

In this paper we propose a utility model that accounts for both sales and branding advertisers. We first study the computational complexity of optimization problems related to both online and offline allocation of display advertisements. Next, we focus on a particular instance of the online allocation problem, and design a simple online algorithm with provable approximation guarantees. Our algorithm is near optimal as is shown by a matching lower bound. Finally, we report on experiments to establish actual case behavior on some real datasets, with encouraging results.