Speaker: Matthew Andrews
Affiliation: Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs

Title: Understanding Sponsored Content in Mobile Data Networks

Abstract:
Sponsored content is a mechanism in which content providers can pay the operator of a wireless network to make their content free to end users. Such offerings have recently been introduced in both the US and Asia and they raise many challenging questions regarding which sites should be candidates for sponsoring and how much the service provider should charge the content provider.

In this talk we introduce a number of models that aim to capture the interactions between the service provider, the content provider and the end users in a sponsored content offering. We show that it is possible to design the system so that it is win-win-win for all players. In many settings the problem is a generalization of the “Adwords” problem that arises in the design of sponsored search. We also show how to analyze network traffic and content provider financial data in order to calculate the input parameters for these models.