A Survey of Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising, a growing category of search advertising, refers to showing a list of ads in a Web page. In recent years, more and more researches have been carried on and various methods have been proposed. In this paper, the up-to-date methods for contextual advertising are studied. After giving a brief review of contextual advertising, three main approaches of current research, i.e. the matching, genetic programming (GP) and semantic approaches, are described and compared. At last, some challenges in contextual advertising are discussed, together with the potential future research directions.