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The first advertisements on the World Wide Web began in 1994. These ads were always placed at the top of a Web page and were always 60 pixels high and 468 pixels wide and were known as banner ads. Whenever anyone thought about Internet marketing back in those early days, the first thing that came to mind was banner advertising. Back in those days, advertisers managed their own banner advertising campaigns and sites sold their own advertising space.

The second generation came along very quickly. Online advertising agencies started to crop up, managing the banner advertising space for very heavily trafficked sites. If you wanted to advertise on a specific site, you worked with their online agency. To advertise with a number of heavily trafficked sites, you ended up dealing with two or three or four advertising agencies.

Almost as soon as banner advertising became mainstream, it started to decline in effectiveness. Click-through rates dropped through the floor, technology to strip out unwanted ads became very popular, and soon there was all kinds of available advertising space at dirt prices and few takers. Banner advertising was okay for branding, but terrible on generating traffic to your site.