Next at Web Science 2016 is Sergej Sizov, who focusses on the economic value of Web advertising. This is surprisingly difficult to calculate, and Sergej begins with the hypothetical example of a small Web advertising campaign. We may make a range of assumptions about click-through and purchase rates, but variance matters: in a substantial number of cases, campaigns may generate no profit whatsoever.
Each campaign constitutes a large number of small events (clicks, conversions, ...), and these can be modelled computationally; from these emerge certain predictions about the probability to make a given profit from the campaign.
