Genetic Algorithms in Online Advertising?

During my visit to Weebly, there were several things that impressed me about the Weebly company and operation.

One item was an application service for online advertising, SnapAd.com. Due to an NDA, I couldn’t talk about it at the time. But, the product is now launched, and it is very impressive both in terms of technology and potential for online advertising.

The SnapAds service starts with a base population of ad variations and then uses a genetic algorithm and click through to select the key characteristic of each ad to morph the top performing possible ad, which is composed of the best elements of each of the ad variations. Think of it as A / B on steroids.

During my visit, I was super impressed with the demo, and SnapAds is one of the first fielded systems in the online marketing area that I have seen that make use of a genetic algorithm.

I have always had an interest in these optimization algorithms for application in the Web search area, with some of my first work being on simulated annealing.

Congrats to David Rusenko, Dan Veltri, and Chris Fanini, the Weebly founders, and to Greg Dingle, the lead developer of SnapAds.

Daehee Park has an interesting blog posting about SnapAds.com.

In addition to maintaining an excellent blog about IT matters, Daehee was on one of the winning teams in the 2008 Google Online Marketing Challenge.