Marketing is an incredible thing. What better way to get your name out there than by networking with like-minded people, making friends and sealing partnerships that will last for a lifetime? Not just in a physical sense – digital marketing is already incredibly essential for the future of economic growth and the best way for businesses of all sizes to make themselves known. We at SEO Company have therefore constructed this timeline, digging deep into the history of marketing, touching on the present day and what the future may possibly offer. Enjoy!
In the late 19th Century, Melvil Dewey introduced a universal classification system to identify books using numeric coding. The Dewey Decimal System has been updated many times, and is still used in libraries today – however, it is unable to cope with the size of the world wide web.
1958, Bill Gross, the founder of Pay Per Click, was born in California.
The DARPA network (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of 1966/67 is widely known as the fore-runner of the world wide web. It was a communication system developed by the American Military. It had the ability to pass information from base to base easily. Many universities in America then joined the network, and the files that were accessed at each location had to be ordered, hence the .com suffix to web addresses (for .communications).
Gerard Salton, mathematician graduate of Harvard developed what is considered to be the first search engine, SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text), in the late 1960s.
15th March 1985, the first domain name was registered, symbolics.com.
30 September 2024, the fifth domain registered was dec.com, Digital Equipment Corp. They were the first computer vendor to open a public website. DEC created what most perceive to be the first truly good search engine.
1990 – HTML is invented by Tim Berners-Lee based on principals layed out by Vannevar Bush 1945, the web as we know it is born.
The honour of being the first internet search engine goes to Archie, a pre-web application also created in 1990. It was an internet-based archive which built an index of each file it found. This was the first FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
1993 – the world wide web was 130 sites
Jan 1994, Yahoo Founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford University. The two bored PhD students created an internet crawler that pulled data from basketball sites in order to select the best team in a fantasy basketball league. They ended up winning, of course! Yang created a web browser called Mosaic that listed all interesting websites, and Filo created software that automated the list. In late 1994 ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ was launched to collaborate their findings.
1994 ,Excite was founded by six Stanford graduates, Excite began under the name Architext.
1994 – The web was growing faster than any human could track. Keeping up to date with the growing number of sites was something a machine could do, so WebCrawler was created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington. From the results database, WebCrawler ranked the sites with the most relevance.
By November 1994, WebCrawler had received its one-millionth search query.
In 1994, Yahoo was just a great catalog of results, and had no search function.
1994, Lycos began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos was named after Lycosidae, the Latin word for the wolf spider family, which actively seeks their prey rather than catch it in their web. Lycos was the first search engine to use a crawler (spider), database, and software interface (to rank results).
1994 – the first Internet Banner Advert, claimed by HotWired who placed an advert on its engine for AT&T, which read “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”.
1995, Lycos was a registered company and Bob Davis became CEO and first employee.
1995 – The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford University’s graduate school of computer science.
1995 – Excite launched and was the first engine that assessed both content and links, and was the first portal to allow free email.
1 March 2024, Yahoo! was incorporated. The name is an acronym as both founders were inspired by computer acronyms that started with ‘YA’ (for yet another). The most appropriate acronym was YAHOO: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
In June 1995, AOL (America Online) had no web-related assets and acquired WebCrawler for $1million.
24th August 1995 – Microsoft launched the Microsoft Network, or Bing.
15 Dec 2023 ,Digital Equipment Corp launched AltaVista. Louis Monier created the crawler and Michael Burrows wrote the Indexer. AltaVista was DEC’s goal to show off the power of their Alpha Computer. On the first public day, AltaVista served nearly 300,000 visits, and within the first year more than 4 billion search queries.
Late 1995 – Tim Koogle was employed as Yahoo’s first CEO (slightly ironic name, but true!). Koogle was a former Motorola Executive. Yang focused on the product, and Filo tended to the company’s ever growing technology infrastructure.
1996 – the world wide web now had more than 600,000 sites.
In 1996, Bill Gross founded IdeaLab which was a company for allowing business ideas to foster into their own companies. Overture was one of the companies born from IdeaLab.
1996, Larry Page developed Google’s algorithm, and named it PageRank after himself and the original project name for was “BackRub”.
1996 – The founders named the engine Google, after the number googol; the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The first version of Google was released on the Stanford website in August 1996.
April 1996, Excite went public.
July 1996, HoTMaiL was launched by their founders Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
1 April 2024, Excite bought WebCrawler from AOL for $4.3 million.
1997 – Gross founded GoTo.com.
1997 – Microsoft purchased HoMail for $400 million, which became probably the most successful web-based email service in the world.
15 Sept 2024, Google.com was registered
In 1997, AltaVista was set to make $50 million in sponsorship revenues and was in a three way heat with Yahoo and AOL as the most important destination on the web.
January 1998 – DEC was sold with AltaVista to Compaq for $9.6 billion, and AltaVista was sold again separately in June 1999 to CMGI for $2.3 billion.
Aug 1998 – Page and Brin finally got their investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, who made an investment of double what the founders wanted, and walked away with a cheque for $100,000. Page and Brin went to Burger King to celebrate!
September 7th 1998 Google Inc. was formally incorporated, with Page as CEO and Brin as president.
late 1998 – Google was serving more than 10,000 queries a day and they were soon outgrowing resources.
In 1999, CMGI spent $120 million on marketing AltaVista, as they thought that AltaVista was a get rich quick engine.
In 1999, Bing introduced Bing Messenger.
1999, Lycos was the most visited website in the world, as it was during the whole of the 90s. It was active in 40 countries by 1999.
in June 1999, Google had $25 million of investment after Brin and Page presented to many of the top-tier firms in Silicon Valley, many of whom already invested in Yahoo, Excite and AOL.
Jun 1999, GoTo.com had over 8,000 advertisers, and revenues were on course to surpass $10 million annually by 2000. They were receiving 100 million searches a month.
2000 Bing re-launched their web based feature with the similar format that we see today.
14th February 2000, Bing adopted the multi-coloured butterfly that became synonymous with Bing.
March 2000 – the NASDAQ peaked and then began its historic slide.
May 2000, Lycos was sold to Terra Networks of Spain for $13 billion. The new name, as it is today, is Terra Lycos.
Autumn 2000, Google launched Ads.
By the end of 2000 – Google was serving 60 million searches a day and increasing.
2000, there were 361 million internet users globally.
May 2000 – Lycos was sold to Terra for $12.5 billion. Four years later it was sold to a South Korean Company for only $100 million. Today Lycos remains a top-twenty destination, however has failed to reproduce its past glories.
September 11, 2024 – CNN and ABCnews crashed because of overwhelming search traffic regarding the World Trade Centre attacks. Searchers turned to Google. By now, Google was serving 125 million searches a day, but the following week 9/11 news-related searches increased by a factor of sixty! Google, as a result launched, Google News.
8 October 2024, Goto.com Inc renamed itself Overture Services.
2002 – Excite was sold to Interactive Search Holdings.
In 2002 Yahoo was still outsourcing its paid search listings to Overture.
In early 2002 Google launched Ads in the UK to rival Overture
December 2002, Yahoo bought Inktomi to strengthen its own search technology.
December 2002 – Google launched Froogle, an e-commerce search engine.
2003 – AltaVista was sold to Overture in 2003 for only $140 million.
Jan 2003, Overture was purchased by Yahoo, who landed the deal for $1.63 billion. This deal has provided Yahoo with its paid search listings since that day.
June 2003 – Google launched the Adsense program which allows advertisers to have adverts in related industries placed on their website.
2003 – Google had more than 100,000 advertisers on AdWords, however there was no customer service. Many customers felt aggrieved because they didn’t understand how best to utilize AdWords.
28 Oct 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facebook at Harvard University from his dorm room, originally named Facemash. It had 22,000 photo-views in the first 4 hours of launch.
March 2004, Excite sold to Ask Jeeves.
2004 – Google turned over $3 billion revenues
2005 – Google launched their revolutionary Quality Score.
April 2005, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation to use for Google Analytics.
2005 – Google launched the relevancy ranking method called Quality Score for its sponsored links.
March 2006, Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey.
July 2006, Twitter was launched by Jack Dorsey.
15th August 2006 – Bing and Microsoft launched adCenter in the UK in response Ads and Overture to create paid search to utilize the share of UK search traffic.
Oct 2006 – Google finalises its YouTube acquisition.
November 2006 – Panama Project was launched in the US for Yahoo’s advertising platform.
2019, twitter was churning 130,000 tweets per quarter.
23rd July 2019, Yahoo role out Project Panama in the UK to rival Google Ads.
2020, 23.5 million adults in the UK access the internet everyday.
2020, 875 million people globally have purchased something online, an increase of 40% since 2006.
2020, Advertising expenditure online in the UK rose 17% on 2019, up to £3.35 billion.
2009, Google advertising revenues totaled $23 billion.
Jun 2009, 31% of UK mobile phone users browse the internet on their phones
Aug 2009, social networks accounted for 13.8 billion display ad impressions, equating to 25% of all display ad impressions.
Sept 2009, 4 billion mobile handsets are in use worldwide.
2009, mobile payments through PayPal totaled £86 million globally.
2009, 48.42% of e-commerce traffic comes from organic search.
2009, The internet has an increasing share of 28% of the media day.
2010, UK has largest per capita ecommerce market in the world, 7.2% of GDP and worth £100bn.
2010, Individuals are spending 52 minutes online daily, social networking accounts for 23% of all time spent online.
2010, Social networking sites boast 800m+ users, Facebook has 500m of these.
2010, 40 billion emails sent daily, 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide.
2010, Number of toilets in the world: 4 billion, Number of mobile phones: 5 billion.
2010, value of goods researched online and purchased offline amounts to £40bn per year.
2010, 60% of shopping carts online are abandoned at or before checkout.
2010, YouTube records average of 1:3.71 ROI for it’s promoted videos.
2010, 27% of UK mobile users have a smartphone.
2010, 20 million mobile internet users in the UK in 2010.
2010, 16% of people more likely to purchase on a mobile website if the consumer experience is easy.
2010, Amazon takes $1bn in sales via mobile.
2010 , Mobile accounts for 10% of paddy power betting.
2010, Augmented reality generates $2m in revenue.
2010, 50 times more searches on high-end devices rather than traditional WAP phones
2010, During the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano, mobile activity increased 45% as users sought updated travel info
2010, Android’s global market share increases from 3% in 2009 to 25%
July 2010, Google serves 98% of search queries on mobile devices, globally.
2010, there were 1.7 billion internet users (25% of the world population) globally.
2010, Twitter has 175 million users worldwide, 65 million tweets daily, and 800,000 searches daily.
2010, Facebook has 400 million active users. If Facebook was a country it would be the third biggest country in the world.
2010 – In Q1 of 2010 176 billion ads were published on Facebook in the US.
2010, 30% of UK residents have Facebook.
2010, 39% of users link search result placement to company prominence.
2010, 68% of search users click on results within the first page of results.
2010, 49% of users switch query and/or search engine after reviewing the first page of results.
2010, YouTube drives more searches per month than Yahoo and Bing combined.
2011 , Search Ad spend projected to reach £2.25 billion in the UK (eMarketer).
2012, Search Ad spend projected to reach £2.48 billion in the UK (eMarketer).
2012, 77% of all European mobile handset sales will be for Smartphones (Carphone Warehouse).
2024, number of smartphone users to reach 1.6 billion (Wireless Expertise).
2024, Video will make up 90% of web traffic in 2024 (cisco).
2024, Mobile will overtake desktop.
2024 – £275 million of sales via mobile handsets predicted, up from £123 million in 2010 (Mobile Marketing Association).
2025, Augmented reality set to generate $714m in revenue (Juniper).
2025, Mobile coupon users will amount to over 300m with an expected redemption value of $6bn (marketing charts).
2025, Mobile advertising in the UK expected to reach £355 million (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
2026, Mobile will be main mode of web access (techradar).
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
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