Contextual advertising for web article printing

Advertisements provide the necessary revenue model supporting the Web ecosystem and its rapid growth. Targeted or contextual ad insertion plays an important role in optimizing the financial return of this model. Nearly all the current ad payment strategies such as "pay-per-impression" and "pay-per-click" on web pages are geared for electronic viewing purposes. Little attention, however, is focused on deriving additional ad revenues when the content is repurposed for alternative mean of presentation, e.g. being printed. Although more and more content is moving to the Web, there are still many occasions where printed output of web content or RSS feeds is desirable, such as maps and articles; thus printed ad insertion can potentially be lucrative. In this paper, we describe a cloud-based printing service that enables automatic contextual ad insertion, with respect to the main web page content, when a printout of the page is requested. To encourage service utilization, it would provide higher quality printouts than what is possible from current browser print drivers, which generally produce poor outputs - ill formatted pages with lots of unwanted information, e.g. navigation icons. At this juncture we will limit the scope to only article-related web pages although the concept can be extended to arbitrary web pages. The key components of this system include (1) automatic extraction of article from web pages, (2) the ad service network for ad matching and delivering, and (3) joint content and ad printout creation.