Introduction
The internet has become the largest and most powerful computing and service platform ever with technology advances in networking, computing infrastructure, and content distribution network. The wide adoption of digital capturing devices and fool-proof media editing tools leads to explosive growth of multimedia contents. User generated content and media sharing websites enable everyone to be a potential publisher. Search technology makes it easy for people to find the media content they want. Social media allow a better understanding of users’ preferences and intents. All this brings unprecedented challenges and opportunities for online media.

Multimedia advertisements can be traced back to banner ads outside a store, display ads at the road side, audio ads from radio station, and video commercials in TV programs. The Internet and mobile devices bring new opportunities for the advertisers to more effectively and efficiently deliver multimedia advertisements. A picture is worth a thousand words. Compared with text, multimedia has some unique advantages for advertising: it is more attractive and more salient than plain text; it grabs users’ attention instantly and it carries more information that can be comprehended quickly. Multimedia ads represent a much more effective way to deliver commercial messages, although the costs are more than text ads, considering larger amount of data transmitted and relatively higher computational requirements.

The explosive growth of multimedia data on the web also creates huge opportunities for further monetizing them with multimedia advertisements. Multimedia content becomes a natural information carrier for advertising in a way similar to radio wave to carry bits in digital communications. More and more business models are rolled out to freely distribute multimedia contents and recoup the revenue from the multimedia advertisements it carries. With the increasing importance of online multimedia advertising, researchers from multimedia community have made significant progresses along this direction. This book aims at bringing together recent high-quality research works on internet multimedia advertising, including basic technologies and applicable systems.

Objective of the Book
The objective and mission of this book is to bring together recent research efforts in the online multimedia advertising area. We will include introductions to basic concepts and fundamental technologies for online advertising (including text), basic multimedia technologies for online multimedia advertising, as well as modern multimedia advertising schemes, theories and technologies. It could also serve as a textbook and a reference guide in this area. As this is the first publication on the subject, it should stimulate research and applications along this direction and more and more efforts will come forth.

Target Audience
Target audience of this book includes (1) Graduate students studying multimedia area; (2) Researchers and professors working on multimedia area; (3) Industry (search engines, video/image content providers, video/image sharing portals, IPTV providers, etc) working on online multimedia business.

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