Fall of the Banner Ad: The Monster That Swallowed the Web

By: Farhad Manjoo | New York Times

Twenty years ago last month, a team of well-meaning designers, coders and magazine publishers inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting world one of the most misguided and destructive technologies of the Internet age: the web banner ad.

If that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one. The first banner ads — those long rectangular ads at the top of a web page — looked innocent enough; a half-dozen spots for a variety of large companies, including AT&T, Volvo and Zima, they made their debut on HotWired, the web offshoot of Wired Magazine, on Oct. 27, 1994.