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The World's First Banner Ad
An anonymous reader submitted a link to what they claim is the the internet's first banner ad. It comes from 1994 HotWired, paid for by AT&T. It's ugly, but no animation, no popups. It makes me a little nostalgic.
I went to have a look, out of curiosity, but privoxy killed it by size... Ho hum :-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I AdBlocked it just before I was tempted to click on it. Bastards won't get me that easily.
it goes to a joke site. Can we get some verification of the authenticity of this? Anyone from the old HotWired days want to comment?
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Could this domain name BEEEE more annoying?
Developers: We can use your help.
I wonder what percentage of people who click from Slashdot will buy today?
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongest domainnameatlonglast.com/first66.html
The World's Longest Domain Name?
If animation bothers you so much, why do you allow it on your own site?
Anyone else remember when Hemos and CmdrTaco violently swore Slashdot would never have Flash ads?
Hmm! That domain name overflowed a buffer in Firefox, and now I have teams of Hungarian hackers fighting Russian hackers for control of my Linux box. Don't click it!!
Get your own free personal location tracker
http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/media_buy/arti cle.php/3430381
...they've gotten MORE obnoxious since that.
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
Google honed the concept of relevance in advertizing with unobtrusive text ads.
Secret sauce: relevance
Result: Profits and a market cap of $130B
Compare this with the fate of the company that paid for that first banner ad...
First spam email in 1978?
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html
I can't believe I clicked on the link... to a banner ad!
that's just silly, and kinda hard to take seriously
Perhaps, some day, stuff like this will be presented in a Museum of Internet Atrocities, collecting the history of spam, banner ads, pop-unders, Flash ads, DDoS attacks, tubgirl and goatse?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
...more interesting. The World's First Patent
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
A Slashdotter Can Dream
Stuff You Already Know (but is likely wrong now)
Hey, This one actually has a computer reference
You Have Them All Memorized, Right?
Yes, The Creators of This Website Are Morons
Sorry but that's utterly bogus. I remember banner ads back in '94 and they did not look like that....
dont forget to use tinyurl for people to get there
The world's first banner ad links to the world's worse joke. Interesting.
If I can't punch a monkey, shoot a duck or try to slash the ninja, I'm not clicking!
How far we've come in 12 years!
Ah, those were the days. It doesn't flash, or Flash, or move, or make noise, or anything. It just... sits there.
/me wipes away a tear.
I believe that the following is the first audio ad. In the early days of AudioNet (Broadcast.com), we began to have problems with other sites deep linking and hijacking our content, passing it off as their own. So, I decided to create an ad that would identify the source "Thank you for listening to AudioNet!" -- which would preceed all our content. I recorded the clip on my perlcorder in my car, in back of AudioNet's home on Elm Street, in the Deep Ellum part of Downtown Dallas. First audio ad
Are you supposed to click on HERE? or are you supposed to click on YOU WILL?
I mean if you click one word or the other they will take you to different internets.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
At least, non-dynamically created banner ads. In The Future, all ads will be dynamically targeted, based on one metric or another. Banner ads will have to adapt or die.
if some poor schmuck has saved the very first piece of spam email sent,. . . EVER!
If you reused another persons advert from 10 years ago, what would the implication be? This just got me thinking about old adverts being recycled by other companies.
Jonathanjk.com
This was a part of AT&T's "futuristic" "You Will" campaign. Anyone else remember the commercials 12 years ago? A lot of the things they promised, like attending meetings in your bare feet, checking out at the super market a shopping cart at a time, are now possible -- just not with AT&T's technology. Sorry, guys.
:(
ad-rag.com has the old TV commercials -- but you have to pay €2 for the privilege.
These are the same people who say the ENIAC was the first computer, and that George Washinton was not the first US president.
It's a real shame that somebody didn't take out a business patent on this - this is an area where stifling of innovation might have been a good thing!
My installation of Firefox isn't blocking it :-(
Stupid firefox, I'm gonna get a *real* web browser, like Lynx - Lynx wouldn't show me the banner ad!!
--LWM
PS My god, it's ugly! We've come a long way! Not sure if that's good or bad...
Does Rob still have the first /. banner ad? That would be some cool nostalgia ...
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
fnord
AdBlock is effective even against such banners. I couldn't see the banner until I disabled my filtering.
Your know the drill; Link or STFU, Trev.
In Soviet Russia advert sells you!
Lets find out exactly when Taco became a sellout to his own cause.
Its the truth.
Mods can't dispute it, so they choose to censor it instead.
So they defined 468x60?
This banner ad can be found here?
Oh how I wanted to do that.
Nonsense. In the late 1980s, Prodigy was using ads that were banner ads in every sense of the word. For all you young whippersnappers, this was before the days of the Internet and HTML. Prodigy used a protocol called, um, NAPHTHA? NABPLANALP? NAMBLA? NAFTA? Anyway, it used a highly compressed format to deliver graphics that looked like Tangrams over the blazing-fast 1200 bps modems that had recently become available.
It was a joint venture of IBM and Sears, and was marketed as being a highly family-friendly service. All content was rigidly controlled. Every posting was inspected and approved by a moderator, and off-topic posts were brutally deleted. Anything criticizing Prodigy, or the moderators (soon referred to as "Cato," as in Cato the Censor), was considered off-topic, of course. You could sometimes get off-color content past them, but only if you were a cunning linguist.
It was heavily commercial. The whole premise was getting people to buy stuff. Their attitude was sometimes characterized as "shut up and shop."
Anyway.
At the bottom of almost every Prodigy screen, there was a rectangular area. It was about an inch high and extended the width of the screen. It was brightly colored (garishly colored, many machines of the time being limited to 16 colors or so) to contrast with the rest of the screen, and decorated with eye-catching blocky NAPLPS (I knew I could remember it) graphics. All of them offered to take you somewhere where you could buy something if you clicked a button.
They were exactly like banner ads.
They were banner ads.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It was pretty savy of them back in 1994 to think of this:
"Thousands of technical jobs online now.. added daily.. (Click to find your perfect job)! "
Hmm, did Yahoo hot jobs exists back then? Oh, right I need to RTFA!
http://www.styla.com/images/port_prodigy_full.gif
Well i wonder if this could be the next thing to take over from banner ads.
http://tads.biz/ [tads.biz] [tads.biz]
Keep em all in one place would be good, and for 16 years!
...you just did
An article about a site with a banner ad on it?
;-)
If this isn't a Slashvertisement, I don't know what is
Funny how TFA wines about Banner adds but is hosted on a page with a HUGE banner
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
who has Slashdot's RSS feed at the top of their Gmail inbox, and thus saw this as:
Slashdot - The World's First Banner Ad - 3 hours ago
It may be the 1st that can be found now, but I find it hard to believe that >1 yr of the www a jpeg was the 1st banner ad, jpegs were quite new, many browsers didn't support them (Xmosaic early versions certainly didn't). I suspect advertising oriented annoying banner ads were in gif format before this one. I was around online back then but everyone just used irc, archie, fsp, ftp and usenet back then the www was fairly unpopular.
Really? Back in the early days, the standard image size for a banner ad was 400x40 pixels. It wasn't for a few years that everyone standardized on 468x60. How about that?
"It's ugly"
Oh yea, banner ads are much more sexy and pleasant today.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
So will we be seeing patents filed for banner ads and lawsuits anytime soon? AT&T proberly regret now that they didn't put a patent on it (or maybe they did?)
....right here?" You will, and you'll block images from Our Server. Then you can idly speculate about what spam would be in the blank spaces on web pages (if it amuses you to do so.)
(psst. does anybody know who's sponsoring Slashdot these days?)
Christ! And people complain about the length of the URL for MY site! <_<
Imagine typing that bastard in while browsing with the PSP!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Advertisers on Prodigy used banner ads back all the way back in '93, certainly before this ad ever existed. And theirs were animated too (gasp!)...
I like the way it's designed to "trick" people into CLICKING RIGHT HERE -> even though the whole block is the link. Yes, I know, we've seen that before many, many times, it just never occured to me that the Internet's first ever banner ad (supposedly) would use gimmick.
And the punchline "YOU WILL!" is a nice touch. How did they know?