When Multimedia Advertising Meets the New Internet Era

The advent of media-sharing sites, especially along with the so called Web 2.0 wave, has led to the unprecedented Internet delivery of community-contributed media contents such as images and videos, which have become the primary sources for online advertising. However, conventional ad-networks such as Google Adwords and AdSense treat image and video advertising as general text advertising by displaying the ads either relevant to the queries or the Web page content, without considering automatically monetizing the rich contents of individual images and videos. In this paper, we summarize the trends of online advertising and propose an innovative advertising model driven by the compelling contents of images and videos. We present recently developed ImageSense and VideoSense as two exemplary applications dedicated to images and videos, respectively, in which the most contextually relevant ads are embedded at the most appropriate positions within the images or videos. The ads are selected based on not only textual relevance but also visual similarity so that the ads yield contextual relevance to both the text in the Web page and the visual content. The ad insertion positions are detected based on visual saliency analysis to minimize the intrusiveness to the user. We also envision that the next trend of multimedia advertising would be game-alike advertising.