Method and system for placement and pricing of internet-based advertisements or services

A system of serving ads on an Internet site, configured such that a publisher is ensured a minimum predictable revenue while also offering the publisher higher revenue for its higher value traffic, the system comprising;

• an Internet property, operated by the publisher, containing at least one page where an advertisement can be inserted for display;
• a data store containing at least one advertisement performance metric;
• a classification system operable to classify Internet ad traffic into performance groups, wherein advertisement performance within each performance group is measured independently of advertisement performance in other performance groups;
• a publisher-rules repository containing a publisher's minimum eCPM price per performance group for ads delivered for display on that publisher's site by an OPO ad server, and further including one or more passback tags associated with the publisher;
• a data store including an inventory of advertisements;
• a rule base having rules operable to match particular ads in the inventory to particular classifications of Internet ad traffic;
• wherein each particular advertisement is associated with one or more ad traffic classifications;
• a pricing and optimization engine configured to periodically update ad prices in the advertisement inventory according to pricing rules;
• the OPO ad server operable to receive a request to deliver an ad, wherein the OPO ad server contains executable operating instructions programmed to consult the classification system to determine the performance group corresponding to a parameters of the ad request, apply the ride base to the advertisement inventory associated with that performance group so as to select one or more associated advertisements whose price is greater than or equal to the minimum eCPM price in the publisher rules repository for that publisher and performance group, and further operable to deliver the one or more advertisements for display on the publishers Internet property, or if no such ads exist then deliver a passback tag registered to the publisher.

A method for delivering advertisements to web pages through an ad server, comprising the steps of:

• classifying the web pages with a classification system;
• applying rules, populated in a rule base, to an inventory of ads and a set of the web pages so as to determine a set of available ads to show on the set of web pages;
• assigning prices to members of the set of available ads according to a combination of a set of prices corresponding to the result of the classifying step's page classification, and a historical performance of each member of the set of available ads;
• and
• ranking the members of the set of available ads according to at least one factor.