  Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be
significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both
web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web
advertising provides them with major sources of revenue. Its presence is
increasingly important for the whole media industry due to the influence of the
Web. For advertisers, it is a smarter alternative to traditional marketing
media such as TVs and newspapers. As the web evolves and data collection
continues, the design of methods for more targeted, interactive, and friendly
advertising may have a major impact on the way our digital economy evolves, and
to aid societal development.
  Towards this goal mathematically well-grounded Computational Advertising
methods are becoming necessary and will continue to develop as a fundamental
tool towards the Web. As a vibrant new discipline, Internet advertising
requires effort from different research domains including Information
Retrieval, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Analytic, Statistics, Economics,
and even Psychology to predict and understand user behaviours. In this paper,
we provide a comprehensive survey on Internet advertising, discussing and
classifying the research issues, identifying the recent technologies, and
suggesting its future directions. To have a comprehensive picture, we first
start with a brief history, introduction, and classification of the industry
and present a schematic view of the new advertising ecosystem. We then
introduce four major participants, namely advertisers, online publishers, ad
exchanges and web users; and through analysing and discussing the major
research problems and existing solutions from their perspectives respectively,
we discover and aggregate the fundamental problems that characterise the
newly-formed research field and capture its potential future prospects.
