“No one had a clue how to monetize the Web until the banner ad came along.”
NEW YORK – As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Netscape IPO, the “Big Bang” that set off a stampede of investment into the fledgling Web, it’s striking how fast things developed.
In 1993, few people had even heard the phrase “World Wide Web.” Roughly two and a half years later, the Web was an “overnight” global sensation.
What happened between 1993 and 1995 that changed things so dramatically?
The answer is the subject of the new edition of the book, How the Web Won, a memoir by Ken McCarthy, who invented the banner ad and is credited by Time magazine as the first to point out the importance of click-through rates.
In 1993 and most of 1994, the Internet itself was a buzzword, but no one had actually figured out how to make money with it. Selling products directly to consumers was not a winner. (Amazon didn’t turn a profit until 2003.) The digital ad business, now a $790 billion industry, was essentially non-existent when 1994 dawned.
Between 1993 and 1995, San Francisco was Ground Zero for creative thinking about the Web’s prospects, but except for a few companies, Netscape in particular, Silicon Valley wasn’t paying much attention to it. As late as November 5, 1994, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and now general partner of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, was quoted as saying, “There are ten companies working on applications for the Web.”
All that changed on June 11, 1994, when Ken McCarthy hosted a small meeting at 3220 Sacramento Street, then the address of a unique tech incubator, before “tech incubator” was a phrase. (Apple had used the space as a research site to work on touchscreen technology.)
At the June 11 meeting, leaders of the then-tiny Internet industry, like Mark Graham, an early Internet commercialization pioneer, and Marc Fleischman, the world’s first full-time Web developer, were invited to share their views on where business on the Web was heading. Also attending was Rick Boyce, then a media buyer for the advertising agency Hal Riney & Partners.
Towards the end of the meeting, McCarthy asked if “little squares” could be put on web pages and if clicking on them could take people to dedicated sales pages. He further wondered aloud if the ratio of page views to clicks could be measured. Mark Graham confirmed that it was entirely doable. A few months later, Rick Boyce left Hal Riney to become director of sales for Hotwired.com, Wired Magazine’s web-based magazine. On October 27, 1994, the banner ad, “a little square” that was clickable and trackable, appeared on the Internet. The buyer was AT&T.
More stories about the Web’s critical transitional years, 1993 to 1995, are available in the new edition of the book, How the Web Won.
