On the 30th anniversary of the Netscape IPO the inventor of the banner ad warns: "Trouble ahead."
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Author of the new book, "How the Web Won", cautions that AI is showing clear signs it's upsetting the fundamentals of the $790 billion digital advertising industry. Businesses that depend on the "blue link" economy need to radically rethink their media strategies.
NEW YORK, Aug. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- AI is having a huge, and largely unreported, negative impact on the "blue link" economy, which includes millions of companies that depend on digital advertising for their revenue, both on the buy and sell side, not the least of which are Google and Meta.
"The Internet economy has been prosperous for so long that many people have forgotten its roots," says Ken McCarthy, author of the new book, How the Web Won.
As late as November 1994, no one had a clue how the Internet was going to be successfully monetized. The answer came from the invention of the humble banner ad, which took place at a small conference McCarthy hosted in San Francisco in May of 1994. Thirty years later, in 2024, the global digital ad business was $790 billion, or 72.7% of the entire $1.09 trillion global ad market.
Digital advertising still follows the simple guidelines McCarthy laid down at that historic meeting: (1) display the ad, (2) count how many people click on it, and (3) calculate the clickthrough rate. The first company to do this on a commercial scale was Hotwired.com, a division of Wired Magazine. Rick Boyce was the company's sales director.
Today, 1 in 5 Internet visits begins with a search, and it's not unusual for a major public company to derive 50% or more of its traffic from search results. AI has already reduced traditional searches by 10%.
Industries being particularly hit hard include travel and tourism (down 20%), e-commerce companies (down 9%), and news and media (down 17%). Individual companies reporting search referral declines include: Schwab (down 14%), TripAdvisor (down 34%), Starbucks (down 41%), and Netflix (down 23%).
"The Web is fundamentally a question-and-answer machine. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee, the co-inventor of the Web, modeled it after the popular Victorian era question-and-answer book, Enquire Within Upon Everything, which was in his family's home as a child. Users of AI are discovering they're getting better answers than they get from search, and search companies, like Google, are seeing their search revenue go into reverse," says McCarthy.
What does the future hold? Part of the answer lies in McCarthy's book, How the Web Won. "Until we came up with the formula in 1994, no one had a clue how the Internet was going to monetize itself. How we came up with the answer is detailed in the book, and the same approach we used would work today."
HowtheWebWon.com
Contact:
Paul Morrison
***@morrisonpublicitygroup.com
Photo(s):
https://www.prlog.org/13090825
Press release distributed by PRLog
View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/on-the-30th-anniversary-of-the-netscape-ipo-the-inventor-of-the-banner-ad-warns-trouble-ahead-302519355.html
SOURCE Ken McCarthy
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Etsy to Participate in Upcoming Investor Conferences | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
Rank Local Now Launches as Central Kentucky's Only AI SEO, CRM, and Media Marketing Agency | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
DealerFire Shares Insights on How Dealerships Can Use Paid Ads Effectively | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
SEO Optimizers Launches Next-Gen AI SEO Services to Help Businesses Rank in AI Search and LLM Results | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
Everything Branding Launches AEO Growth Program to Secure AI-Recognized Press | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
Ericsson announces change to the Executive Team | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
PicoCELA Inc. Receives Nasdaq Notification Regarding Minimum Bid Price Deficiency | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
AI-Driven Expense Management Agent (2025): QuickBooks Awarded Best AI Expense Tracking and Categorization Tool by Better Business Advice | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
FileOnQ's New Offering Empowers Agencies to Uphold Justice for Sexual Assault Survivors | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
3D Printing Ceramics Market worth $0.97 billion by 2030 - Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets(TM) | Aug 31, 2025
|
|
|
