Cooperative Online Native Advertisement: a Game Theoretical Scheme Leveraging on Popularity Dynamics

We propose a model for native online advertising, a recent technique able to safeguard user's online experience and yet greatly accelerate the virality of a content. As of now, the cost of native advertisement represents a high entrance barrier for potential customers of advertisement hosts. In this paper, we argue that cooperative schemes can lower this entrance barrier. In fact, when different content providers (CPs) advertise their products on the same web-page, virality of the web-page itself can boost the number of potential customers, causing a non linear dynamics in the revenue of CPs. By utilizing a cooperative game theoretical framework, we derive a sufficient condition, depending on system's parameters, under which it is profitable for different CPs to advertise their products together. Under a mild assumption, the condition is also shown necessary.