First made popular in the 1990's, banner advertising has had its ups and downs in the online marketing world.
A little history lesson: In October 1994 Hotwired magazine launched the first banner ad, some say for AT&T, others say another client. So banner advertisements have been around for seventeen years. Wow!
I have memories of working on a proposal in the 90's for a website that was to include banner advertising. Our approach was to take a percentage of the ad revenues in lieu of a high price tag for the website development. Thinking back on that now, I am amazed at how popular banner advertising was when it first started out. Those ads, which were usually at the top of the web page and often flashing were annoying in my opinion. They also tended to be ugly. Why people clicked them is beyond me.
At what point their usefulness waned I can't tell, except that it occured after 2000. Companies stopped buying them, websites stopped displaying them, revenues dropped considerably. You would have thought that would have been the end of it.
But no, today the second most popular form of online marketing is marketing on social network sites - using banner advertising. In the first two quarters of 2007, banner ads and display advertising accounted for nearly 21% of $10 billion in online ad revenues (according to BizReport.com).
The banner ad has come full circle. At least they look a lot nicer now (for the most part).
We didn't win that proposal, I believe because the potential client couldn't comprehend the profit model. Bet they don't think that way now.
