Tonight when I was reviewing Revive adserver to see if it would meet my needs for this site, I found that it wouldn't because it doesn't natively support responsive ad delivery. Though I've seen hints that people have been using custom plugins and hacks to get around that limitation.

So I discarded the idea of using Revive and I thought about how I could implement something in this TYPO3 site. I know there's been a few simple ad delivery extensions over the years for TYPO3, but those I'm not going to look into because they are old and probably too simple for what I want.

Then I got the idea about how I use MySQL to use its full text search capabilities to display relevant articles to any article on this site. And that has worked well for me and it's something that I wanted to adapt to a Solr foundation instead of MySQL.

So that brings me to this minute when I'm thinking that if Solr could be used to show my relevant articles on this site, using it's "more like this" feature, then Solr could certainly be used to deliver, or choose, relevant ads to serve. 

I'm only thinking about making an ad delivery solution for this site and other sites I own, and not an ad serving platform that would serve ads on sites I don't own. So that makes things a little bit simpler, only having to meet the requirements for this site.

I've found a couple of sources that mention using Solr as a core part of an ad delivery system.

The first is the story of a guy who worked on a solution for Rakuten and here's his presentation from 2013 on that.

The slides from his presentation can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/lucenerevolution/using-lucene-solr-to-build-advertising-systems

Also, from some preliminary searching I learned that a Solr book from Packd Publishing titled Apache Solr Search Patterns  which has a chapter titled Architecture of an ad distribution system. From what I can tell from the Publisher's site, this chapter goes into detail about a Solr based system for selecting ads to display on a web site. 

I do think I'll be heading toward Solr in my future and using it to select ads to serve based on visitor information, page information, and other factors.

I just wanted to share those two resources with you so in case you're interested in using Solr for this, you too have this information.