The Reserve Price of Ad Impressions in Multi-Channel Real-Time Bidding Markets

With the application of big data analytics in online marketing, real-time bidding (RTB) has developed to be the primary business model and also the major online advertising channel. Due to the precise analysis of Web Cookies, RTB platforms can target the visiting audiences and then forward their generated ad impressions to demanding advertisers who bid on the best-matched audience in a real-time fashion. In RTB markets, the reserve price plays the vital role as a tuner to exclude over-low bids, and hence guarantee the desirable sales prices and revenues for publishers from ad impression sales. In this paper, we strive to study the publisher’s strategy on the reserve price and probe its impact on his/her revenues. We first discuss the reserve price of ad impression in a single-channel sales model, including the online RTB channel or the off-line direct channel, aimed to study its impact on the publisher’ revenue. Then, we further analyze the impact of the reserve price in the multi-channel settings. Finally, we conduct experiments using empirical log data collected from real-world RTB markets to validate our models and analyses, and the experimental results indicate that: 1) in the single-channel sales model, publishers should set the reserve price for only the online-channel ad impressions while not for the off-line-channel ones and 2) in the multi-channel ad impression sales, publishers should set both off-line and online reserve prices for revenue maximization.