The online advertising space has grown by leaps and bounds since the online ad made its first appearance. Today, online advertising revenue has surpassed all forms of traditional advertising combined in the United States.
This 100 billion dollar industry only reached such heights because it adapted to the exact needs and desires of customers. That is to say, advertisers.
Due to the internet’s incredible versatility, digital advertisers have been able to devise a plethora of ad forms: each one
In this article, we are going to review some of the most common desktop ad types and how they fit into the ecosystem.
Mobile being one of the primary drivers of growth for the modern advertising industry, it is essential to understand the various mobile-specific ad types. For this reason, mobile ads are covered in a dedicated article.
What are thee, Desktop?
Let’s start by defining terms. “Desktop” ads are not exclusively for “desktops,” but rather for any full-form factor computer.
So the term could refer to a laptop or a desktop.
So, desktop ads are the ads that a user would see if he were browsing the web using Safari on his Macbook Air or Firefox on his old Dell.
Just like the desktop is the oldest form factor of personal computing, so too is the desktop ad the oldest form of display advertising on the internet.
While it would be nice to be able to point to a banner and say that this was the first ad, in reality, online advertising began differently (though we do have the first banner!).
And it wasn’t exactly a welcome addition to the nascent internet, because the first online advertisement was… spam. First by email, then by USENET.
The first email advertisement (and likely the first internet advertisement) was an email sent by a DEC marketer on May 1, 1978. The internet as it is known today did really exist yet. This email was sent over ARPANET.
The goal of the email was to promote an upcoming sales event.
Here is the email:
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM
AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 <PDP-10> COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T
AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.
WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY
AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS
MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 – 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA
THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 – 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)
A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND,
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.
The response to this first email was decidedly negative, mainly because the acceptable use policies at the time forbid commercial activity.
One of the leading networks at the time, NSFNet, retracted its commercial activity ban in 1991. This retraction was a crucial step forward for the development of the internet. An internet wherein profit is often the driving motivation beyond innovation.
The First Display Ad
In 1994 the first banner ad ever was served on Wired.com. Back then, the popular internet news website was known as HotWired.
The banner was very basic and was a part of a more extensive campaign that AT&T was running at the time (that included television ads among others).
While AT&T was first out the gate with its online display ad, several other companies were already waiting their turn for the very same space on the same site. This waiting list of customers before anyone had even tried the idea goes to show that many parties, even in the early 90s, recognized the internet’s commercial potential.
Once this first “You Will” campaign ad debuted, the online display ad industry exploded. This massive expansion in online advertising played a huge part in the inflation of the .com bubble that would build up over the ensuing six years.
Desktop Ad Industry Size
Despite the unfortunate outcome of the 2000 .com bubble, which would shake the entire internet industry to the very core, the early online ad ventures had proven the value of online advertising. Its growth was all but assured as more and more homes bought internet service every year.
Today, the online ad industry has reached epic proportions. And for a long time, this growth was primarily driven by ads served to desktop users.
Desktop ads were predominant primarily because, well, the desktop was the only device through which home users connected to the internet.
As such, it was (outside of email marketing) the sole driver of early online ad industry growth. Today it remains a very significant part of the online advertising industry, though one that is no longer growing.
Further, a desktop user is likely to be more focused on his task at any given time than a mobile user. The phone can just be pulled out and used for a minute; when one sits down at a desktop, it’s often for hours at a time.
Today desktop display ads remain a cornerstone of the magnificent edifice that is online advertising.
That said, it’s a shrinking slice of a growing pie.
Desktop Ad Industry (lack of) Growth
The Desktop Display Ad industry may have driven growth for a long time, but now it is being eclipsed by mobile advertising. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the two most important are: smartphone usage has skyrocketed and the proliferation of adblocking on desktop.
This combination of factors has led to a push-pull situation that has positioned mobile ads (both for
In fact mobile advertising now accounts for over 2/3 of total ad revenue in the United States.
We will cover the diverse array of mobile ads in a different article since they are incredibly diverse in type and of incredible importance for the future of the ad industry.
Desktop Ad Types
Because of its long history of advertisement and rich display capacity, the desktop has been the theater of a large number of innovative ads.
Banner Ad
With the exception of email (and perhaps certain forms of content advertising), the banner ad was the first significant form of online advertising.
A banner ad is a horizontal or vertical slice of a page that is used to display an advertisement. They are called banners because their original size and shape looked like just that, a banner.
Though rather than being hung on a bridge, a building, or over a storefront, these banners were hung above, below, and next to the main body of a webpage.
If you look at the first banner ad ever from hotwired, you’ll see that the way banner ads work hasn’t changed in essence. Graphic design, however, has vastly improved over the last two decades!
Banner ads remain one of the most common kinds of ads in online advertising.
Search/Text
Search advertising quickly followed the development of search engines. The idea was relatively simple.
Search engines are designed to help you find something, now what if we let advertisers pay us to put them near the top of the list?
This was the essential idea behind search advertising. This style of online advertising remains one of the most important to this day (on both desktop and mobile).
In fact, search-based advertising was responsible for 45% of online advertising revenue in 2018, according to the IAB.
So while this kind of advertising is rather simple in appearance, it is a huge businesses in reality. And because of its enormous market-share, a lot of effort is put into improving search advertising performance.
The search engine is like the beach of online surfing, no matter how you surf or where you’re going, you always start at the beach. Likewise, almost all web surfing adventures start with a search engine, making them an ideal place to pick up customers.
Popup
Perhaps one of the most infamous forms of online advertising, the popup is also the most iconic. When one thinks of internet advertising, one of the first things to come to mind is the popup.
And that’s because it is so effective at getting the user’s attention.
The problem is that it gets the user’s attention by getting between said user and the thing he wants to see. So while it might be an effective way of getting one’s message in front of a potential consumer, the feelings it builds toward one’s brand are decidedly negative.
Popups are largely on their way out today as adblockers become more widespread and users less tolerant of such advertising methods. Even the inventor of the popup has disavowed it!
Popunder
Advertisers shortly after developed the “popunder,” a style of advertisement that, like a popup, opens a new window with the advertisement.
There is a critical difference between the two, however.
Namely that they don’t get in the way of the user and what he wants to see. Instead, popunders open under the target site and then, only when he closes the browser, does he see popunder.
This style of advertisement is significantly more user-friendly than popups. Even if it demands less attention, the attention it does get is much more likely to be positive.
Push notification
The push notification is one of the most popular ad forms right now on both desktop and mobile.
A push notification is a notification that a user sees as soon as it is sent (or right after he connects after sending). This is in contrast to other kinds of advertisements that require the user to take action before they are served.
For example, to see a banner he must go to a site where it will be served. To see a video ad, he was to watch a video on a platform first; then and only then will the ad be served. Etc, in all of these cases the user makes and action, then the ad is served and the user can either interact with it or ignore it.
With a notification ad, the dynamic is entirely different.
Rather than waiting for the user to make an action, then serve an ad, the notification is sent out at the advertiser’s discretion. The advertiser chooses when and to whom and then the notification is sent, appearing instantly before the user.
This generally occurs in one of two ways.
But before either of them can occur, the user has to have agreed to receive notification advertisements. One desktop browsers, sites routinely ask for permission to send the user notification (generally under the guise of keeping you up to date with happenings on the website).
On mobile, it is a little bit more complicated as it varies by Operating System. On Android, for example, the user automatically agrees to receive notifications by merely downloading and installing an app.
When you install an app, it by default has the right to show you notifications.
This is not the case with Apple iOS, where one has to explicitly opt-in to receive notifications.
This often means that advertisers need to think about how they want to engage with mobile notification subscribers. Android app users might be less engaged and more prone to being annoyed by the number of notifications they receive from a rarely used app. Whereas with Apple iOS subscribers, the advertiser can logically presume that they are a little bit more engaged as they explicitly agreed to receive notifications.
Due to the way this style of advertisement as a notification originates on the advertiser side, it is much less prone to the most common kinds of advertising fraud.
You can read more about push notifications here at one of our articles dedicated to the subject.
Interstitial ads
These are ads that appear between two pages. So, for example, if you click to go to the second page of an article and a fullscreen advertisement is shown that requires you to click through, that’s an interstitial ad.
They often appear on slideshows and lists and articles that use similar styles of organization. You’ll click through three slides, then have an ad page before the forth.
That’s an interstitial ad.
Countdown ads
This isn’t necessarily an ad type sui generis, but rather a subtype of other ad types.
Countdown ads are ads that make an offer that has a supposed time limit. This time limit is designed to create a sense of urgency in the consumer, driving him or her to click on the ad to lock in the offer.
Countdown ads are often popups or popunders and less commonly interstitial or banner ads.
These ads are becoming less and less common because they don’t tend to elicit positive feelings from the user. Instead, they are both distracting and distressing.
While they do work for certain products and with certain publishers, by and large, they are being left behind.
Audio ads
Audio ads on sites have always had a bad reputation. As advertisers have very little to no control over the volume, audio ads might not be audible at all. Or they might be very loud.
While they can potentially grab a lot of attention, they have largely fallen out of favor due to negative feedback. Most users don’t like it when sites play audio in the background, advertisement, or otherwise.
Today audio ads are almost exclusively used on audio medium content such as internet radio or podcasts.
Native Ads
Native ads are currently one of the most popular forms of online advertising right now. They consist of articles, reviews, and even videos that fit in with the content and context.
Native ads take a much different approach to online advertising than most styles of ads. Instead of trying to attract the attention of the reader or viewer away from what he wants to be doing towards the advertisement, native ads try to fit in.
The idea is that by fitting in with the content, the user won’t be jarred by the advertisement, but rather engage with it as if it were a natural part of the site itself.
That’s not to say that native ads pretend to be neutral content: they’re always marked as “sponsored content” or advertising. Instead, they try to fit into the content itself so that the transition from content to advertisement and back is smooth and comfortable.
Native ads became very popular very quickly, and today, they are among the most successful advertisement that one can place. That said, push notifications have somewhat eclipsed native ads.
Video Ads
Video ads are one of the areas of growth for desktop ads.
With Generation Z watching, on average, 68 videos per day, advertisers have a lot of opportunities to reach valuable young consumers with this medium.
Online video ads are more of a category than an ad form. There are many types, from interstitial video ads that play halfway through a YouTube video to pre-video ads and even post-video ads.
Some online video providers, such as YouTube, even allow for small text banners to be dynamically served near the bottom of the video.
Video ads have played a significant role in the growth of online advertising over the last few years. They also appear positioned to continue that growth in the medium and long term.
According to the IAB, two-thirds of advertisers will be shifting funds from their television ad budget to Online Video.
This trend is just another manifestation of the broader shift from traditional media to online ad forms.
Conclusion
Online advertising was born in, evolved in, and, for a large part, remains on the desktop. But consumer patterns are changing. Consumers are spending more and more time on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and these require specially adapted advertising styles.
That said, the desktop advertising market remains enormous. And that’s unlikely to change. This is still a growing global industry (even if the primary impetus for online ad growth is now mobile).
Native, Push, and Video ads seem to have the brightest futures on Dekstop. But new ad styles are always in development. So, while the future of desktop advertising might be hard to predict, it continues to offer qualities that are likely to keep users engaged.
More screen real estate, higher resolution. Far better and more engaging games. Much more powerful hardware. These are all qualities that make the desktop a form
Mobinner is a High-Performance Demand-Side Platform for both desktop and mobile advertising. We have a history of driving growth, conversion, and brand awareness for a diverse array of advertisers. Learn how we can help you meet your goals here.
