Online Advertising
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Online advertising Online advertising, also called online marketing or In- American west coast users, advertising an open house for ternet advertising or web advertising, is a form of mar- a new model of a DEC computer.[6][11] Despite the pre- keting and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver vailing acceptable use policies, electronic mail market- promotional marketing messages to consumers. It in- ing rapidly expanded[12] and eventually became known cludes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), as "spam.” social media marketing, many types of display advertis- The first known large-scale non-commercial spam mes- (including web banner advertising), and mobile ad- ing sage was sent on 18 January 1994 by an Andrews Uni- vertising. Like other advertising media, online advertis- versity system administrator, by cross-posting a religious ing frequently involves both a publisher, who integrates message to all USENET newsgroups.[13] Four months advertisements into its online content, and an advertiser, later, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, partners in who provides the advertisements to be displayed on the a law firm, broadly promoted their legal services in publisher’s content. Other potential participants include a USENET posting titled “Green Card Lottery – Fi- advertising agencies who help generate and place the ad nal One?"[14] Canter and Siegel’s Green Card USENET copy, an ad server which technologically delivers the ad spam raised the profile of online advertising, stimulat- and tracks statistics, and advertising affiliates who do in- ing widespread interest in advertising via both Usenet dependent promotional work for the advertiser. and traditional email.[13] More recently, spam has evolved In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States into a more industrial operation, where spammers use surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded armies of virus-infected computers (botnets) to send those of broadcast television.[1]:19 In 2013, Internet ad- spam remotely.[11] vertising revenues in the United States totaled $42.8 bil- lion, a 17% increase over the $36.57 billion in revenues in 2012.[2]:4–5 U.S. internet ad revenue hit a historic high of $20.1 billion for the first half of 2013, up 18% over 1.2 Display ads the same period in 2012.[3] Online advertising is widely used across virtually all industry sectors.[1]:16 Online banner advertising began in the early 1990s as Many common online advertising practices are contro- page owners sought additional revenue streams to sup- versial and increasingly subject to regulation. Online ad port their content. Commercial online service Prodigy revenues may not adequately replace other publishers’ displayed banners at the bottom of the screen to promote revenue streams. Declining ad revenue has led some pub- Sears products.[15] The first clickable web ad was sold by lishers to hide their content behind paywalls.[4] Global Network Navigator in 1993 to a Silicon Valley law firm.[16] In 1994, web banner advertising became main- stream when HotWired, the online component of Wired 1 History Magazine, sold banner ads to AT&T and other compa- nies. The first AT&T ad on HotWired had a 44% click- through rate, and instead of directing clickers to AT&T’s In early days of the Internet, online advertising was website, the ad linked to an online tour of seven of the mostly prohibited. For example, two of the predeces- world’s most acclaimed art museums.[17][18] sor networks to the Internet, ARPANET and NSFNet, had “acceptable use policies” that banned network “use for commercial activities by for-profit institutions”.[5][6] The NSFNet began phasing out its commercial use ban in 1991.[7][8][9][10] 1.3 Search ads GoTo.com (renamed Overture in 2001, and acquired by 1.1 Email Yahoo! in 2003) created the first search advertising key- word auction in 1998.[19]:119 Google launched its “Ad- The first widely publicized example of online advertis- Words” search advertising program in 2000[20] and intro- ing was conducted via electronic mail. On 3 May 1978, duced quality-based ranking allocation in 2002,[21] which a marketer from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), sorts search advertisements by a combination of bid price Gary Thuerk, sent an email to most of the ARPANET’s and searchers’ likeliness to click on the ads.[19]:123 1 2 2 DELIVERY METHODS 1.4 Recent trends dio, animations, buttons, forms, or other interactive el- ements using Java applets, HTML5, Adobe Flash, and More recently, companies have sought to merge their other programs. advertising messages into editorial content or valuable services. Examples include Red Bull's Red Bull Media House streaming Felix Baumgartner's jump from space Frame ad (traditional banner) Frame ads were the online, Coca-Cola's online magazines, and Nike's free ap- first form of web banners.[17] The colloquial usage of plications for performance tracking.[18] Advertisers are “banner ads” often refers to traditional frame ads. Web- also embracing social media[22][23] and mobile advertis- site publishers incorporate frame ads by setting aside a ing; mobile ad spending has grown 90% each year from particular space on the web page. The Interactive Adver- 2010 to 2013.[1]:13 tising Bureau's Ad Unit Guidelines proposes standardized pixel dimensions for ad units. 2 Delivery methods Pop-ups/pop-unders A pop-up ad is displayed in a new web browser window that opens above a website vis- 2.1 Display advertising itor’s initial browser window.[29] A pop-under ad opens a new browser window under a website visitor’s initial Display advertising conveys its advertising message visu- browser window.[1]:22 Pop-under ads and similar tech- ally using text, logos, animations, videos, photographs, or nologies are now advised against by online authorities other graphics. Display advertisers frequently target users such as Google, who state that they “do not condone this with particular traits to increase the ads’ effect. Online practice”.[30] advertisers (typically through their ad servers) often use cookies, which are unique identifiers of specific comput- ers, to decide which ads to serve to a particular consumer. Floating ad A floating ad, or overlay ad, is a type of Cookies can track whether a user left a page without buy- rich media advertisement that appears superimposed over ing anything, so the advertiser can later retarget the user the requested website’s content. Floating ads may disap- with ads from the site the user visited.[24] pear or become less obtrusive after a preset time period. As advertisers collect data across multiple external web- sites about a user’s online activity, they can create a de- Expanding ad An expanding ad is a rich media frame tailed picture of the user’s interests to deliver even more ad that changes dimensions upon a predefined condition, targeted advertising. This aggregation of data is called such as a preset amount of time a visitor spends on a web- [25] behavioral targeting. Advertisers can also target their page, the user’s click on the ad, or the user’s mouse move- audience by using contextual and semantic advertising to ment over the ad.[31] Expanding ads allow advertisers to deliver display ads related to the content of the web page fit more information into a restricted ad space. where the ads appear.[19]:118 Retargeting, behavioral tar- geting, and contextual advertising all are designed to in- crease an advertiser’s return on investment, or ROI, over Trick banners A trick banner is a banner ad where the [26] untargeted ads. ad copy imitates some screen element users commonly Advertisers may also deliver ads based on a user’s sus- encounter, such as an operating system message or pop- [32] pected geography through geotargeting. A user’s IP ad- ular application message, to induce ad clicks. Trick dress communicates some geographic information (at banners typically do not mention the advertiser in the ini- [33][34] minimum, the user’s country or general region). The geo- tial ad, and thus they are a form of bait-and-switch. graphic information from an IP can be supplemented and Trick banners commonly attract a higher-than-average refined with other proxies or information to narrow the click-through rate, but tricked users may resent the ad- [35] range of possible locations.[27] For example, with mobile vertiser for deceiving them. devices, advertisers can sometimes use a phone’s GPS re- ceiver or the location of nearby mobile towers.[28] Cook- ies and other persistent data on a user’s machine may pro- News Feed Ads “News Feed Ads”, also called “Spon- vide help narrowing a user’s location further.[27] sored Stories”, “Boosted Posts”, typically exist on Social Media Platforms that offer a steady stream of informa- tion updates (“news feed”[36]) in regulated formats (i.e. 2.1.1 Web banner advertising in similar sized small boxes with a uniform style). Those advertisements are intertwined with non-promoted news Web banners or banner ads typically are graphical ads dis- that the users are reading through. Those advertisements played within a web page. Many banner ads are delivered can be of any content, such as promoting a website, a fan by a central ad server. page, an app, or a product. Banner ads can use rich media to incorporate video, au- Some examples are: Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories”,[37] 2.1 Display advertising 3 LinkedIn’s “Sponsored Updates”,[38] and Twitter’s “Pro- ding. This involves many parties interacting automati- moted Tweets”.[39] cally in real time. In response to a request from the user’s This display ads format falls into its own category because browser, the publisher content server sends the web page unlike banner ads which are quite distinguishable, News content to the user’s browser over the Internet.