Online advertising
Many internet users also find online advertising disruptive[6] and have increasingly turned to ad blocking for a variety of reasons.
[18] [19] Four months later, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, partners in a law firm, broadly promoted their legal services in a USENET posting titled "Green Card Lottery – Final One?
[15] Online banner advertising began in the early 1990s as page owners sought additional revenue streams to support their content.
The first clickable web ad was sold by Global Network Navigator in 1993 to a Silicon Valley law firm.
[32] The owner of the first nest discovered in the United States – in Blaine, Washington – demanded its return instead of allowing scientific investigation, and proceeded to sell it.
Display advertising is ubiquitous across online systems including websites, search engines, social media platforms, mobile applications and email.
Banner ads can use rich media to incorporate video, audio, animations, buttons, forms, or other interactive elements using Java applets, HTML5, Adobe Flash, and other programs.
[41] "News Feed Ads", also called "Sponsored Stories", "Boosted Posts", typically exist on social media platforms that offer a steady stream of information updates ("news feed"[42]) in regulated formats (i.e. in similar sized small boxes with a uniform style).
Text-based ads may display separately from a web page's primary content, or they can be embedded by hyperlinking individual words or phrases to the advertiser's websites.
Search engine marketing includes all of an advertiser's actions to make a website's listing more prominent for topical keywords.
Search engines regularly update their algorithms to penalize poor quality sites that try to game their rankings, making optimization a moving target for advertisers.
[25]: 119 Modern search engines rank sponsored listings based on a combination of bid price, expected click-through rate, keyword relevancy and site quality.
Many companies promote their products by posting frequent updates and providing special offers through their social media profiles.
This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including blogs, news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides and more.
However, even these are usually merely presenting content that they are marketing as information in a way that is different from traditional print, radio, TV, film, email, or web media.
An online marketing platform (OMP) is an integrated web-based platform that combines the benefits of a business directory, local search engine, search engine optimisation (SEO) tool, customer relationship management (CRM) package and content management system (CMS).
Online business marketing platforms such as Marketo, MarketBright and Pardot have been bought by major IT companies (Eloqua-Oracle, Neolane-Adobe and Unica-IBM).
"[69] Almost half of the small and medium-sized businesses who responded to an EU survey in 2018 said that they use online marketplaces to sell their goods and services.
[77] CPC's market share has grown each year since its introduction, eclipsing CPM to dominate two-thirds of all online advertising compensation methods.
GoldSpot Media reported that up to 50% of clicks on static mobile banner ads are accidental and resulted in redirected visitors leaving the new site immediately.
Both Google and TubeMogul endorsed this standardized CPV metric to the IAB's (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Digital Video Committee, and it's garnering a notable amount of industry support.
Performance-based compensation can also incorporate revenue sharing, where publishers earn a percentage of the advertiser's profits made as a result of the ad.
Advertisers have a wide variety of ways of presenting their promotional messages, including the ability to convey images, video, audio, and links.
Ransomware gangs were spotted using carefully targeted Google search advertising to redirect victims to pages dropping malware.
[96] Eye-tracking studies have shown that Internet users often ignore web page zones likely to contain display ads (sometimes called "banner blindness"), and this problem is worse online than in offline media.
[105]: i In the United States, the FTC has released a set of guidelines indicating that it's the advertisers' responsibility to ensure the ads display any required disclosures or disclaimers, irrespective of the users' technology.
Cisco's 2013 Annual Security Report revealed that clicking on ads was 182 times more likely to install a virus on a user's computer than surfing the Internet for porn.
The United States has specific restrictions on online tracking of children in the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA),[137]: 16–17 and the FTC has recently expanded its interpretation of COPPA to include requiring ad networks to obtain parental consent before knowingly tracking kids.
[142] Otherwise, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission frequently supports industry self-regulation, although increasingly it has been undertaking enforcement actions related to online privacy and security.
In contrast, the European Union's "Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive" restricts websites' ability to use consumer data much more comprehensively.
