The Birth of Internet Advertising

While banner ads are among the early forms of web advertising, the first Internet ad was the infamous post on a Newsgroup in 1994 that spawned spam. The Canter & Siegel law firm posted an ad to over 7,000 newsgroups on USENET, causing quite a stir. The firm was subsequently mail-bombed and dropped by multiple Internet service providers.

The lawyers ignored the critical rules of newsgroup advertising, which have very specific regulations governing the posting of comments. When posting comments, your subject matter must be on topic, and you can't post the same comments across all newsgroups. You must post comments that fit in with the discussion at hand, and this means posting helpful information without promoting your business. Albeit, you were allowed a sig file, which could implicitly serve as an ad. So the law firm went ahead and posted off-topic comments that amounted to an ad. You can imagine the furor, at a time when the digerati were overprotective of the fledging Internet. Thus, the first Internet ad was spam. Not long after, various individuals began the nefarious practice of sending out mass unsolicited email messages, which further propagated spam � and everyone's indignation.