Since the early advent of technology, the Internet has completely changed the way people relate to advertisements. As computers prices decreased, online content became accessible to a large portion of the world's population. The first type of relationship between a website and an advertiser was a straightforward, direct partnership. This partnership model implies that the advertiser promoting a product or service pays the website (also known as a publisher) directly for a certain amount of ad impressions. The first digital ad, called a
banner ad, was run in 1994 by AT&T on a site called HotWired. As time went on, publishers began creating thousands of websites, leading to millions of pages with unsold ad space. This gave rise to a new set of companies called
Ad Networks. The ad network acted as a broker, buying unsold ad space from multiple publishers and packaged them into audiences to be sold to advertisers. This second wave of advertiser-publisher relationships rapidly gained popularity as it was convenient and useful for buyers who often found themselves paying a lower price yet receiving enhanced
targeting capabilities through ad networks. The third and most recent major development that shaped the advertiser-publisher ecosystem started occurring in the late 2000s when widespread adoption of
RTB (real time bidding) technology took place. Also referred to as programmatic bidding, RTB allowed companies representing buyers and sellers to bid on the price to show an ad to a user every time a banner ad is loading. When a page loads during a user visit, there are thousands of bids occurring from advertisers to serve an ad to that user, based on each company's individual algorithms. With this most recent change in the industry, more and more ads are being sold on a single-impression basis, as opposed to in bulk purchases. ===Programmatic, Real time bidding (RTB)== Programmatic display advertising, or
real time bidding (RTB), transformed the way digital display advertising is bought and managed in recent years. Rather than placing a booking for advertising directly with a website, advertisers will manage their activity through a (
demand side platform), and bid to advertise to people in real time, across multiple websites, based on targeting criteria. This method of advertising quickly gained popularity, as it allows for more control for the advertiser (or agency), including of the individual target audience, rather than just the website. It has become a threat to website operators and generally the cost paid for advertising in this way is less than the old method and so the earning potential for them is reduced. Programmatic is not without its drawbacks, as without the appropriate management adverts can appear against unsavoury content or inappropriate news topics. This issue became front-page news in February 2017, when advertisers on
YouTube were found displayed on terror group websites and fake news sites. As a result, a number of major advertisers paused all of their online advertising until they could put the appropriate measures in place to prevent this occurring again. Other issues can arise from this method of buying display ads, for example since
DSPs mostly buy from inventory on the public
ad exchanges, the quality of the impressions bought can often be questionable and low value. in response to this, in the past few years we have seen the proliferation and use of private deals through
PMPs.
First online advertisement The birthday of the first banner display on the World Wide Web was on 27 October 1994. It appeared on
HotWired, the first commercial web magazine. The COCONET online service had graphical online banner ads starting in 1988 in San Diego, California. The
Prodigy service, launched also in 1988, also had banner ads. ==Operations==