Ad tech pivots in 5 year intervals

1. Launch 1994 – A lot has changed since the world’s first banner Ad launched on HotWired for AT&T. It soon caught on quickly with Yahoo announcing an advertising deal for their own primitive banner ads.

The Click Through Rate, CTR back then was around 44% reported for Yahoo, and due to the nature of advertising interrupting what the user is actually trying to do, the effectiveness and all KPI’s have been decreasing year on year ever since!

2. 4 years later – It was only in 1998 that Google Search Engine came on the scene and advertisers turned to PPC with Goto.com, due to the ever decreasing CTR’s of display ads. But it didn’t take long for Google to swiftly follow in the footsteps for DoubleClick with the birth of Google Adwords in 2000.

Facebook was launched in 2004 which was the year that AOL also acquired Advertising.com

3. 8 years later social media advertising was born – YouTube launched their video platform in 2005 and shortly after in 2006 launched their video Ads. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 and also in 2007 Google acquired DoubleClick, whilst Facebook offered targeted Ads on their own network. It was a few years later in 2009 that Google launched their DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

2010 saw the birth of Instagram whilst Twitter introduced promoted tweets.

4. Another 4 years – In 2012 Native Advertising rebooted the system and increased the declining CTR’s

5. 5 years later – 2017 saw Ads.txt introduced by the IAB to improve transparency and reduce the enormous and mounting Ad Fraud. CTR’s continued to decrease along with other key performance metrics year on year.

In 2019 increasing data protection concerns prompted the ICO to clamp down on the AdTech sector.

In 2020 CMA identified issues with the imbalance of competition in online platforms and digital advertising and suggested a new pro-competition approach should be taken to regulating platforms.

In March 2021, the UK government announced it was accepting all of the Furman Review’s strategic recommendations for unlocking competition in digital markets.

6. Another 5 years on and the market is ripe for disruption in 2022 – Earneco launches a new ad serving platform which puts the user truly at the centre, both in control and benefitting financially.