What was the click-through rate on the first banner ad?

Trivia 28 of 30

What was the click-through rate on the first banner ad?

The world’s first banner ad appeared in October, 1994. The website that developed and published it was HotWired.com, the digital counterpart to Wired magazine. It should be noted that the publication has repeatedly and profusely apologized for its part in this story.

The banner ad in question was part of an integrated marketing campaign by AT&T, who paid $10,000 per month for three months to have the ad live atop HotWired.com. It cost the equivalent of a full page ad in the print magazine at the time (digiday.com).

For two years prior to the debut of the banner, AT&T had run a campaign focused on “futuristic technological wonders.” They aired a variety of TV commercials showing futuristic day-to-day experiences. For example, one commercial asked, “Have you ever renewed your driver’s license… from a cash machine?” Another one asked, “Have you ever watched the movie you wanted to… the minute you wanted to?” All these ads ended with the same promise: “You will.” The HotWired “You will” ad was an extension of this campaign (theguardian.com) so the content of the ad would have seemed pretty familiar already to the website’s users.

AT&T’s world-changing ad measured 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Clicking on it took you on a “tour of some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Louvre, the Library of Congress, and the Andy Warhol Museum.” The experience was meant to demonstrate the transformative power of the internet, and AT&T’s ability to help you take advantage of it (theguardian.com).

Incredibly, for over four months, the ad enjoyed a Click-Through Rate of 44% (theguardian.com)—an astounding number. To put that stat into perspective, the average click-throughrRate on banner ads had already sunk as low as 0.04% (or 1 out of every 2,500 people) as early as 2013 (wired.com).

Interestingly, despite this jaw-dropping stat, the process of finding that number was not straightforward. There were no internet cookies back then, nor any analytics platforms. The site’s developers actually had to count the number of lines in the website’s log file. They counted them up and then emailed their results to their advertisers (digiday.com).

Also, back then, the internet was browsed through 28K dial-up modems. It was not what we would consider “fast” by today’s standards. According to Jim Speros, VP of Advertising and Marketing for AT&T at the time, the experience of watching the ads load was “like watching paint dry […] It was pretty cool to show these innovations, but it was a shitty user experience” (digiday.com).

Web surfers today would probably say the same thing about experiencing banner ads, despite their faster connections.