Economics of public Wi-Fi monetization and advertising

Haoran Yu, Man Hon Cheung, Lin Gao, Jianwei Huang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There has been a proliferation of public Wi-Fi hotspots that serve a significant amount of global mobile traffic today. In this paper, we propose a general Wi-Fi monetization model for public Wi-Fi hotspots deployed by venue owners (VOs), where VOs generate revenue from providing both the premium Wi-Fi access and the advertising sponsored Wi-Fi access to mobile users (MUs). With the premium access, MUs directly pay VOs for their Wi-Fi usage; while with the advertising sponsored access, MUs watch advertisements for the free usage of Wi-Fi. VOs sell their ad spaces to advertisers (ADs) via an ad platform, and share a proportion of the revenue with the ad platform. We formulate the economic interactions among the ad platform, VOs, MUs, and ADs as a three-stage Stackelberg game. By analyzing the equilibrium, we show that the ad platform's advertising revenue sharing policy affects a VO's Wi-Fi price but not the VO's advertising price. Moreover, we prove that a single term called equilibrium indicator determines whether a VO will fully rely on the premium access, or fully rely on the advertising sponsored access, or obtain revenue from both types of access. Numerical results show that the VO obtains a large revenue under a large advertising concentration level and a medium MU visiting frequency.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE INFOCOM 2016 - 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781467399531
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Jul 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: 10 Apr 201614 Apr 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
Volume2016-July
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Conference

Conference35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period10/04/1614/04/16

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