Challenges in providing online advertising technology solutions

Internet advertising spending in the United States totaled $16.9 billion for 2006, up 35 percent from $12.5 billion in 2005 (according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau). U.S. online ad revenue is expected to have climbed to about $20 billion in 2007. These growth rates have increased the incentives and the opportunities for both advertisers and publishers, as well as they contributed to the emergence of novel online business models. This talk will present the various online advertising models and the associated metrics used to monetize these services. At Atlas, we provide a complete suite of online advertising solutions to advertisers and publishers. We will briefly go over the products supporting this. We will dive into some of the technological challenges encountered while serving 8B ads/day (164,359 ads/second), handling an ad inventory of about 23M display ads and 23M search keywords, coming from 16K advertisers, and processing 80TB log files daily. We will discuss the architectural considerations and some of the implementation solutions employed in developing the system that handles this data processing.
A Michigan graduate (PhD CSE 2001), Radu is currently a Senior Software Engineer in Atlas Search, Microsoft Advertiser & Publisher Solutions. He has worked at Valaran, a software startup in Princeton, NJ, developing a Jini-based dynamic business framework for enterprise application integration (EAI). He also spent half a year as a visiting professor at Rutgers University, doing research on utility-based adaptation in mobile computing applications and game theoretic approaches for building adaptive mobile applications. After working at Microsoft in the XML Messaging Web Services product group (currently WCF) and at Amazon.com on supply chain fulfillment optimization, he is now back at Microsoft working on infrastructure for online search advertising. He is excited to come back to his alma mater for the CSE 50th anniversary, to meet old acquaintances as well as new Michigan folks.