Matching Contextual Ads and Web Page Contents through Computational Advertising: Getting the Best Match

The technological transformation and automation of digital content delivery has revolutionized the media industry. What is more, the Internet is rapidly turning into an advertising channel. Just in the United States, Internet advertising revenues hit $7.3 billion for the first quarter of 2011, representing a 23 percent increase over the same period in 2010 (iab.net, 2011). Beneficiaries of this investment and growth are search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Also, Malaysian advertising landscape is gradually shifting its traditional media forms to the emergent of Internet advertising but still at a budding stage. The latter shows much room for growth, as the industry fuels to content digitization on Web applications.
In this project, the types of Internet advertising that is going to be discussed on are Contextual Ads and Sponsored Search Ads, but the major scope will be on Contextual Advertising. Given that, these types of advertising have the central challenge of finding the “best match” between a given context and a suitable advertisement, through principled way of computational methods. Hence, it is also referred as Computational advertising. Furthermore, there are four main players that exists in the Internet advertising ecosystem that are going to be discussed in this study, which are; Users, Advertisers, Ad Exchange and Publishers.
Hence in order to find ways to counter the centre challenge, this research study will mainly address two objectives, which are to successfully make the best Contextual Ads selections that match to the Web Page contents through the concept of Computational advertising, and to ensure that there is a valuable connection between the Web pages and the Contextual Ads.
Thus, the scope of the study will be mainly on discussing about the theory of Computational advertising itself, besides elaborating on Contextual Ads, matching Contextual Ads and Web pages and also, finding the most feasible way in creating the valuable connection between Contextual Ads and the Web pages. Moreover, at the end of every discussion in every subtopic, some insights on the Internet advertising in Malaysian context are discussed as per related issue.
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Consequently, this study employed two main methods to address the research questions rose. Those methods include extensive research and analysis on previous literature works and journals, and also in depth surveys to collect related data and information in real-life situations. Every part of gathered data and findings will then be analyzed accordingly. All discussions, conclusion and future recommendations are presented as per sections. Hence in order to prove the working mechanism of matching Contextual Ads and Web pages by using Computational advertising approach, Web pages together with the ads matching system, will then be developed through FYP-II timeline, as the final product of the study.