History of pay-per-click

How did it all start?

[FridayNight]

I am about to write detailed seminary work. i am going to write about PPC industry and PPC search engines. Would you be so kind to help me with topics? I thought of something like that:

1) How and where did PPC industry start?
2) PPC search engines (first ones, most popular,...)
3) Types of search engines; meta, with advertisers, etc
4) Paid mails / GPR/ Paid to read programs
5) Click fraud
6) Keyword related, contextual,...

etc etc.

Do you have some ideas or maybe useful URLs? Especially those that explain history, ups and downs, trends,...

[andye]

Feb '98, Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com (later Overture, now part of Yahoo!) presented a PPC search engine proof-of-concept to the TED8 conference in California.

That's the earliest I know of, would be interested to hear if anyone has earlier references.

best, a.

[gregbo]

This could be an interesting thread. I found a few sources with links to other sources. Most of these chronicle the early history of banner advertising, but there is some discussion of early PPC.

[uwacadweb.uwyo.edu...]
[ciadvertising.org...]
[udel.edu...]

[shorebreak]

RealNames was an early, major competitor to GoTo/Overture. They had MSN, AltaVista, Excite and Google carrying their paid listings, as well as iWon and a number of others - at one point Realnames' distribution was larger than GoTo's.

Because of the importance of RealNames in getting Google into the paid search space, I think any discussion of the history of ppc has to include RealNames.

-Shorebreak

[gregbo]

I found another article written by two Yahoo researchers:

[asis.org...]