Sunday, October 20, 2013

The evolution of the online ad

Reason for Blog:

I've created this blog to discuss the reasons we block ads. Over the course of the next three posts, we will discuss how to block ads on Windows, Mac and Android.  This current post will deal more with why online ads became so bothersome and yet so profitable, helping to make
Google worth $334 Billion.

The Ads starting out:

The above ad was the first banner ad ever on the internet and it was released on Oct. 27, 1994, on HotWired for AT&T.  At this time, the internet was considered more of an information source as opposed to a money-making resource.  As ugly and as uninformative as this ad is, it sparked the development of an increasingly invasive ad system.

Today we have multiple types of ads that have become increasingly annoying and controlling over our computers.  Some of these include:


  • Pop-ups ads that appear when you first visit a website by opening a new window that you have to close to continue.
  • Pop-under ads are like pop-up ads except that they display after you leave the website
  • Floating ads which are ads that hover over the text of a website before you close them out
  • Expanding ads which start out smaller and them expand sometimes to take up the whole screen until you close them
  •  Video ads which play sometimes automatically when visiting a website and other times between video content such as the ads you would see on youtube.com
  • Text ads which are often marketed to the user based on the text on a website.  Google uses these ads often on the top of search results.  Alternatively if you have gmail, Google places ads along the interface of your mail.
Ads continue to grow and continue to stand out in websites.  As more users start to ignore a certain type of ad, advertisers continue to find ways to make ads mandatory to see.  Sometimes they require you to view an ad for a certain amount of time before continuing to an article or website.  Such ads need to have controls or protocols or be stopped and that is where this blog comes in.

No comments:

Post a Comment