About six months into the positioning’s launch in 1994, Zuckerman and his team began working on a visual page builder, one which would let users create an easy web homepage on Tripod by just dragging and dropping some images and text. Basically, an individual could sign up and, using just a single textarea and a few buttons, build out a complete online page. Late one night, they ultimately got the page builder completed, and threw it up on a separate portion of the positioning without even requesting permission from their CEO. It was a massive hit.
By noon a higher day, all in their servers were overloaded. Riding the wave of their success, Tripod doubled and tripled down on their page builder, and their platform became an incredibly typical destination for a complete new technology of electronic natives trying out out the chances of the online. But smallpox is an especially apt metaphor for the banner ad. It spread like a deadly disease. Over the years, banner ads got increasingly established, but advertisers only identified the floor value of Hotwired’s ads.
They kept the long oblong format, doubtless the most superfluous of the judgements the team had made, but removed the clickthrough touchdown pages and substance. Sites began plastering their pages around the globe with ads, and placing them right into the content itself. For most web users, ads just got worrying. And so engagement went down. Way down. Like lower than 1% down.
Good intentions gone wrong.
