> People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising
They haven't forgotten anything. This claim is so barely true it's not worth considering.
The web both became accessible to ordinary users and gained support for inline images with the release of Win/Mac Mosaic in August 1993. In October 1994 the first banner ad appeared in HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine.
Given that that web went only one year between gaining support for images and people starting to use them for advertising, the idea that the web existed before advertising isn't really true. There have been ads for as long as there has been web content created by paid professionals, as is to be expected.
> I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
You are of course welcome to create a list of websites that don't advertise and then only browse those, although recall that HN obviously wouldn't be usable by you as it is supported by ads. The rest of us will get on with living our lives.
There's been a real qualitative change too. It was October 27th, 1994, and it was Wired's fault. The same year those bottom feeding lawyers decided to bombard Usenet with their green card spam. The first banner advertiser was AT&T:
Interestingly ads roughly coincides with the "eternal september", the time when the internet really became public. It means that the greater web, the one that is accessible to all people was born with ads.
And BTW, I wouldn't trade todays internet for what we had in the 90s. Yes, it was cleaner back then, ye didn't have to worry too much about ads, privacy, all that stuff and the SNR was much higher but it doesn't make up for the sheer amount of information that is available now backed by search engines that are borderline psychic.
On the web side I remember back to at least 95 pretty well and there were banner ads everywhere. I had a homepage with like 3-4 web ring banners on it + the ads from Geocities themselves.
A quick look says the first banner ads appeared in 1994 and the first paid ads in 1993.
I think you're probably looking back with rose tinted glasses.
Oh there were banner ads, but most were for link exchanges. Remember those?
You'd browse someone's website and a banner ad would promote somebody else's. You could get lost for hours!
The "roll back to the 90's" argument is a common (sometimes deliberate) misinterpratation of any suggestion for change to the status quo of the internet that supports "tech" companies.
We could not go back to old days even if we wanted to; no one is suggesting such an idea. We can however look back and learn lessons from the past. We can remember, for example, that neither Google nor Facebook required any business plan that included advertising in order to be created. We can contemplate how bad things have gotten.
Some say online advertising today bears little resemblance to the online advertising of the 1990's, that it has been infiltrated by people who would otherwise be working in finance, e.g., "qwants", that online ads have become like HFT and that the market being run (unfairly) by its largest participant, Google, may explode.
IIMNM the first ads I remember were banners, used to be banner exchange between willing webmasters turned into paid for banners (not sure if it was per impression or per click or both).
There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet?
That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. Also you don't have the same needs and wants as the billions of other people who spend time online to make a judgement that most content isn't worth paying for.
Sites from the late 90s had ads and SEO. Some pretty terrible ads like flashing banners, popups, and later Flash. In fact Flash bad reputation wasn't because the tech was bad, far from it, but because of how it was used, particularly in ads. Popup blockers were the ad blockers of the time, and the situation with popups was so bad that popup blocking became a standard feature of most browsers. As for SEO, it was crude, like the search engines of the time, but it was there, keyword stuffing, link farms, etc...
Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.
Well yes, there was a period of time during the 20th century when all commercial activities were banned from the internet, until around 1995 IIANM. Basically Internet was non commercial from about 1978 to 1995, though I think the first banner ad came to existence 1 year before in 1994, that's still a longer period without ads than with.
I spent years browsing the web before it had any advertising on it at all. I remember the first ads, they were called "banners" and everyone raged out about how awful they were.
But we had no idea just how truly awful they could become, and that in fact the entire infrastructure of the internet would bend so that tracking and advertising became omniscient and pervasive. What a nightmare.
For a few years there though it kind of looked like the web was going to remain free and open forever. Back when we were all so young.
When? Banner ads appeared in '94 (in HotWired), and targeted ads in '96 (service by Affinicast).
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