Efficient scheduling of Internet banner advertisements

Despite the slowdown in the economy, advertisement revenue remains a significant source of income for many Internet-based organizations. Banner advertisements form a critical component of this income, accounting for 40 to 50 percent of the total revenue. There are considerable gains to be realized through the efficient scheduling of banner advertisements. This problem has been observed to be intractable via traditional optimization techniques, and has received only limited attention in the literature. This paper presents a procedure to generate advertisement schedules under the most commonly used advertisement pricing scheme---the CPM model. The solution approach is based on Lagrangean decomposition and is seen to provide extremely good advertisement schedules in a relatively short period of time, taking only a few hundred seconds of elapsed time on a 450 MHz PC compared to a few thousand seconds of CPU time on a workstation that other approaches need. Additionally, this approach can be incorporated into an actual implementation with minimal alterations and hence is of particular interest.