The First Banner Ads, Fifteen Years Later

Late in 1994, when I first noticed HotWired, the original digital offshoot of Wired magazine, what really caught my eye were the banner ads that promised to help the new company monetize its content. I was working at the senior management level inside a traditional media company at the time, and one of my duties was to help discover new ways to produce revenue.

As it turns out, today is the 15th anniversary of the birth of digital advertising, as memorialized in a wonderful post by the ad executive, Frank D'Angelo, who helped created what was apparently the first big corporate banner campaign, commencing on HotWired on October 27, 1994. (Several other accounts cite other dates, but they all are more or less around the same time frame.)

By the time I joined HotWired a little over a year later, as the producer of the first daily political website, The Netizen, banner ads were becoming a pretty robust business. Over the years, as D'Angelo notes, it has grown into a $24 billion-dollar industry, but back then, clickable banners were such a novelty that his original campaign, attracted a 78 percent click-through-rate!

At informal executive round-tables I was part of in that era, we discussed issues as as how to establish standards for this new industry and how to balance the ads and content on our web sites. It all seems so quaint now!

Anyway, it's time to wish "Happy Birthday" to the little ads that revolutionized the publishing industry.