Article: The emergence of ad space, an opportunity for a new industry

By Gérard LALLEMENT*, Jacques SERRIS** and Dominique VARENNE***

* Engineer from École des Mines, Conseil Général de l’Économie, de l’Industrie, de l’Énergie et des Technologies (CGE);

** Engineer from the École des Mines, (CGE);

*** Financial controller, (CGE)

Abstract

The advertising banners displayed on Web pages remind us of 19th-century newspaper ads. The words used to talk about them in French (e.g., impression, coût per mille) have been inherited from measurements of mass circulation. New methods for selling ad space through auctions in real time are, however, grabbing a growing share of the online banner market. Along with the methods developed earlier for buying key words, they generate an ongoing relation between thousands of advertisers and hundreds of thousands of screens, while passing through the go-betweens that manage platforms and interfaces… in all, millions of pages viewed by surfers on the Internet. When coupled with techniques for tracing the itineraries of cybernauts as they successively browse websites or with statistics on their behavior patterns (profiling), previously unsold screen space becomes valuable. Advertisers will also be better able to target their sales on a larger number of websites.