Back in October 1994, when Hotwired displayed the first banner ad purchased by AT&T, began the era of online advertising. As this garnered more and more attention other websites too started selling advertisements across their websites. With an increasingly high number of people wanting to advertise their businesses across multiple available websites, there lacked a proper exchange system for the buyers and sellers to interact, negotiate, and make deals happen. Post the success of AT&T, online ads became increasingly popular.
It was in 1995 when Web Connect, one of the first ad networks, was found and gave the industry an organized and coordinated platform where publishers could place the available inventory of a variety of ad-displays while the advertisers could purchase all kinds of inventory as per their business models and objectives. Web Connect was also the first agency to come up with a tool that prevented ‘Banner Fatigue’; which is how if a consumer looks at the banner 3 to 4 times, that reduces the chances of them opening it.
Slowly more and more players brought in such revolutionizing changes, such as DoubleClick, one of the world’s first ad-server; it started tracking banner ads, their outreach, and effectiveness on the dynamic audiences. It also started tracking consumer behavior and was the first ad-tech based platform with tools calculating return on investment for the advertisers to choose more monetizing options.
DoubleClick also happened to be one of the few tech companies which survived the burst of the dot com bubble.
In the same year, 1996, the International Advertising Bureau was found. It was a collective solution to rationalize industry guidelines, formalize the research and development, and be a legal foundation for the online advertising industry. It was in 1997 when Pop-up ads were found by Tripod employee Ethan Zuckerman but as soon as they were launched, they were found intrusive, and hence blockers came up to counter them.
The pay per click model was another major innovation which revolutionized the advertising industry. It was the brainchild of Goto.com and IdeaLab founder, Bill Gross. Then came Google, with a search engine that rules the market today. It was in 2000 that AdWords came in for placing word-based ad search across Google and slowly other search engines. Following all this, came Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat like a series of dominoes falling down so as to push more upward, the online advertising industry.
Coordinating with all these software-based revolutions, came the hardware ones- with newer laptops, tablets, smartphones; more efficient, with internet more easily accessible due to the spectrum development; and slowly they became more and more affordable, that today or say in 2018, there were about 4.33 Billion active users on the internet while being about 248 million back in 1999. While 122 million smartphones were sold in 2007, 1560 million units were sold in 2018.
That the world had about 1.7 billion websites until last year.
All this research, these statistics are a clear indicator that the advertising industry has still got ever-increasing opportunities and ever-increasing chances to revolutionize itself and clearly, the world along with it.
