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This is such a warped and cynical view of history. Yes, advertising existed if the binary existence is what matters to you, but most online spaces were nearly f
by svachalek 2mo ago
This is such a warped and cynical view of history. Yes, advertising existed if the binary existence is what matters to you, but most online spaces were nearly free of it until the DoubleClick days -- that's 25+ years.
Even then, huge swaths of the web were people putting up their personal pages, blogs about their interests, pages for their church or club or hobby, etc etc. Sites like Geocities ran dumb ads on the pages to provide the hosting service, not so every single kid with an animated gif on the page could get rich.
Early advertising was primitive by today's standards, the amount of tracking and spying we consider normal now would have been an outrage and would have gotten those companies regulated into bankruptcy if they'd tried it in the 90s.
TLDR no, just no. The early internet was nothing like the garbage we have now.
- mike_hearn 2mo agoBut almost nobody had access to the internet before 1995, so the fact that there was a 25 year period in which TCP existed but it wasn't used for much beyond manually routed emails and FTP isn't that important. Once the web was created and the internet became visual it was only a few years until advertising arrived. And sure, the ads were used to pay hosting costs. Nobody got rich off banner ads on cookery sites. But that's what I said - ads appeared immediately because servers and bandwidth were expensive. So the moment people had to pay their own way instead of being subsidized by the government, ads appeared. Nobody was going to get regulated into bankruptcy in 1995, politicians were largely ignoring the internet back then.