Online advertising is said to have started back in 1994-5 with some law firm in the USA. At that time, publishers used simple banners, images, to promote others’ products, and those were not even linked always, and were simply ads on a virtual billboard.
Here too, evolution took its path and along came the search engines, email advertising, contextual advertising, flash media, icon drops and more.
Furthermore – advertising has stopped being “take my money and put me up there” – advertisers began to analyze their campaigns, optimize them, and use hundreds of tools and professionals to squeeze the most of every cent spent on each and every campaign.
This, in turn, forced the publishers to evolve too, allowing the advertisers privileges as unique visitor/impression advertising, daily caps, geo-targeting, social targeting and more.
Nowadays, and for the past couple of years, we see the online evolution going towards what we call “web2.0”, “web3.0”; nice no-real-reason terms for websites that put an emphasis on user-uploaded content, the option to speak your mind (talkbacks, posts, blogs and so on), and a clean, smooth design most of the time.
