A Goal Programming Model for Selection and Scheduling of Advertisements on Online News Media
Digital revolution has resulted in a paradigm shift in the field of marketing with online advertising becoming increasingly popular as it offers the reach, range, scale and interactivity to organizations to influence their target customers. Moreover, web advertisement is the primary revenue stream for several websites that provide free services to internet users. The website management team needs to do a lot of planning and optimally schedule various advertisements (ads) to maximize revenue, taking care of advertisers’ needs under system constraints. In this paper, we have considered the case of news websites that provide news to its viewers for free with ads as the primary source of their revenue. The considered news website consists of many webpages with different banners for advertisement. Each banner consists of different number of partitions and cost per partition varies for different rectangular banners. Many ads compete with each other for their placement on a webpage on a specific banner, based on partition requirement, at specific time interval(s). Here, we have formulated a mixed integer 0–1 linear programming advertisement scheduling problem to maximize the revenue over planning horizon divided into time intervals under various system and technical constraints. A case is presented to show the applicability of the model. Branch and bound integer programming and goal programming techniques have been used to solve the formulated problem.