Twenty years ago, in 1994, advertising methods began to appear on the still-nascent Internet. Two decades later, we can see a great evolution in the way advertising is displayed in digital environments .
As you can see in the infographic at the end of the post, it all started with Apple's commitment to the multimedia environment, which led to the launch of the first Macintosh with HyperCard in 1987.
From there, self-publishing and multimedia tools emerged along with disruptive elements such as the World Wide Web (WWW), social networks and tablets in an unstoppable evolution that has brought us to where we are today.
Without going into detail, it can be seen that there have been 5 major stages that are differentiated but not mutually exclusive, since today all the models coexist, some with greater success than others:
1.- The banner is the king of the party
The first internet advertisements borrowed their form from the advertisements shown in the press . These were banners , flags of various sizes that were standardized with the creation of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) with the aim of promoting online advertising. To do this, it was identified as necessary to create standards that would help the development of the digital advertising industry. This form of online advertising consisted of including an advertising piece within a web page.
IAB banner formats
Later, technology began to appear, such as adservers, to help count loan database banner appearances or distribute inventory among different digital media. In this way, the possibility of generating multimedia and interactive banners was created, which is why somewhat more intrusive systems such as pop-ups or pop-unders proliferated.
All of this was based on a relatively new sales model since, for the first time in history, the advertiser could pay only for the impressions their ad had, the CPM or cost per thousand .
2.- Google Adwords introduces Cost per click (CPC)
A qualitative leap in the evolution of digital advertising came with the appearance of Google and its advertising system, Adwords, which more closely resembled the text ads of the origins of print media .
Google Adwords and CPC
Furthermore, Google Adwords was a very different way of dealing with the operation, as it was based on an auction model and, in addition, in this model the advertiser does not pay based on the audience that sees an advertisement but based on the user who responds to the advertisement , that is, they only paid for each click that was obtained, the cost per click (CPC). All this with a central element: the keywords by which each search was defined.