A Brief History Of Online Advertising
A Brief History Of Online Advertising: We do love internet, we cannot imagine our lives without it nowadays. And internet for us common users consists of websites, where we can read news play games, watch videos, check email and do other innumerable things.
History of Online Advertising – The First Banner Ad (1994)
Have you ever clicked you mouse right here? You will!
Once in the beginning of 1990-ies people understood that this wonderful tool is not temporary and is going to live and grow, naturally some bright minds thought of advertising on it. And it did happen in 1994. It is a solemn date for banner ads since on October 27, 1994 the world’s first ever banner ad appeared on HotWired, the first commercial magazine. Actually it was the day the magazine itself started, so it just opened with the banner on it already. 
The ad read “Have you ever clicked you mouse right here? You will”.
The fonts were of multi colors and it had 44 percent clickthrough rate, an unbelievable number for today. The banner was order by AT&T who paid 30 thousand dollars for it to appear on HotWired for three months. In 1995 an agency called WebConnect started to offer targeted ad placement using some information about the users. It also used CustomView tool, which monitored how many times the same user saw the ad and changed it to another one to prevent the so called banner fatigue.
History Of Online Advertising – DART (1996)
In 1996 a company called DoubleClick offered its clients a new service DART – Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting. This tool enabled advertisers to see how their ads were performing, how many times they were seen and clicked and that eventually improved ROI. A new costing impression appeared – Cost Per Impression (CPI).
History Of Online Advertising – The First Pop Ups (1996)
In 1997 Ethan Zuckerman created a method to enable pop ups appeared on websites. Initial high hopes turned to negative ones, since the users were outraged with what seemed to be infringement on their privacy. From 2000 nearly all known browser came out with some sort of pop-up blocker.
History Of Online Advertising – PPC (1999)
In 1999 GoTo.com offered the first ever pay for ad placement search engine service. Pay for ad placement soon became pay per click.
History Of Online Advertising – Targeted Ads (2006)
In 2006 with the appearance of social media, a revolution in targeted ads was already a fact. Such websites as Facebook accumulated huge date on its users and thus pioneered a new era of non aggressive but hyper targeted ads.
2010 – Present
Advertisers make text, video, rich media ads for media sites. The concept of native advertising is born. Meanwhile, ad blocking gets more and more popular and developed, which poses a real threat to the advertising world. Serious research is underway now to make ads less visible and more acceptable.
