Scheduling online advertisements to maximize revenue under variable display frequency

The online advertising industry realized annual revenues estimated at over $26 billion, in the United States alone, in 2010. Banner advertising accounts for an estimated 23% of all online advertising revenues. Publishers of banner advertisements face a scheduling optimization problem on a daily basis. Several papers in the literature have proposed mathematical models and solution approaches to address a publisher's banner advertisement scheduling problem and the problem has been shown to be NP‐hard. In this paper we propose a new model variation for the problem, which incorporates variable display frequencies. We find that the variable‐display frequency model provides significantly improved space utilization relative to the fixed‐display frequency model and consequently higher revenues for the publishers.