PageSense: Toward Stylewise Contextual Advertising via Visual Analysis of Web Pages

The Internet has emerged as the most effective and a highly popular medium for advertising. Current contextual advertising platforms need publishers to manually change the original structure of their Web pages and predefine the position and style of embedded ads. Although publishers spend significant effort optimizing their Web page layout, a large number of Web pages contain noticeable blank regions. We present an innovative stylewise advertising platform for contextual advertising, called PageSense. The “style” of Web pages refers to the visual appearance of a Web page, such as color and layout. PageSense aims to associate style-consistent ads with Web pages. It provides two advertising options: 1) If publishers predefine ad positions within Web pages, PageSense will analyze the page style and select ads, which are consistent with the Web page layout, and 2) if publishers impose no constraints for ad placement, PageSense will automatically detect blank regions, select the most nonintrusive region for ad insertion, associate color-consistent ads with the Web pages, and deliver them to blank regions without breaking the original Web page style. Our experiments have verified the effectiveness of PageSense as a complement to existing contextual advertising.