The bot con boom: How AI, ads are altering the identity and purpose of the internet

The first ad on the internet was posted on October 27, 1994.

AT&T paid $30,000 to hotwired.com in exchange for a banner ad for three months.

The ad featured just two sentences: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU WILL”.

Clicking on the ad took the user to a page that held three hyperlinks. The first read “Have you ever toured an art museum without leaving your seat?” Clicking that link took one on a virtual tour of some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Louvre and the US Library of Congress. (The other links took you to more information about AT&T’s products, and a feedback survey.)

During the three months that the ad was up, 44% of the people who visited the site clicked on it.

Advertisers took note, and flocked to the new medium. Initially, they would negotiate with websites directly, for a flat rate, much like AT&T did. But soon a new advertising model emerged. By 1995, the websites Netscape and Infoseek had shifted to a pricing model known as cost per thousand impressions (CPM; M being the Roman numeral for 1,000).

In 1997, the infamous popup ad was born. The first ad servers to measure the return on investment of online ads appeared. By February 1998, the search site goto.com was “selling” its top search results slots, by auctioning search terms – or keywords.

Later that year, Google launched its search engine.

Ethan Zuckerman, former director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Civic Media, and the inventor of the popup ad, has called advertising the internet’s original sin.

It “became the default business model on the web,” he wrote, in a 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “because it was the easiest model for a web startup to implement, and the easiest to market to investors. Web startups could contract their revenue growth to an ad network and focus on building an audience. If revenues were insuﬃcient to cover the costs of providing the content or service, it didn’t matter-what mattered was audience growth, as a site with tens of millions of loyal users would surely ﬁnd a way to generate revenue.”