A History Of Advertising On The Internet

What are you doing right now? Youre looking at the Internet! You and millions of other individuals are using the World Wide Web for information, entertainment, and communication. Ever since the introduction of the Web in 1991, it has grown at a phenomenal pace, both in terms of number of users and money invested. And where theres eyeballs and money, theres advertising. Advertising on the Internet is a major revenue stream for most of your favorite websites, and this article will trace how it evolved from early efforts to modern multimedia marvels.

The early days of Internet access were dominated by service providers. Subscription services like AOL and Prodigy worked as a gateway to the larger World Wide Web, charging users a fee for access. Slowly, those providers began to leverage their traffic to feature sponsors as well. Unfortunately, because the modems of the era were painfully slow (even the 56KBPS modem wasnt common back then), ads were pretty ineffective and even simple graphics took forever to load. But the advent of faster modems improved the potential of advertising on the Internet, with more data being pushed to home computers than ever before.

In the late 1990s came the dot-com boom. All of a sudden, Internet access became ubiquitous. Everybody and their mother was hopping online, and services like WebTV made it easy to surf the information superhighway. That period was the dawning of the online superretailers like Amazon.com, who demonstrated that you could turn a profit by eliminating the infrastructure of a brick and mortar store and running a virtual storefront instead. Content was also booming in this period, with groundbreaking Web magazines like Word.com and Slate.com producing cutting-edge content that pushed the envelope of what the Internet was capable of. Advertising on the Internet boomed with the introduction of the animated GIF image now banners and spot ads could move and grab eyeballs from elsewhere on the page.

And after the boom, of course, came the bust. The revenue models for most of these sites was about as flimsy as toilet paper, and when confidence on Wall Street dropped, the vast majority of them went under. The lucky ones sold their equity to other investors and got out with a wad of cash, but more were left holding the bag. After a period of hibernation after September 11th, advertising on the Internet came back with a vengeance as rich media applications brought television-like experience to the computer, and sites like Hulu and YouTube are riding the wave.

Whats next for Web advertising? Its not for me to predict, but with technology and avarice both speeding forward at a full clip, Im sure well see for ourselves soon enough.