Post date: 23 May 2026
Here's some notes I made about the history of digital marketing, and the Internet in general for a digital marketing course I took a couple of years ago...
It's been reported that in 1978 Gary Thuerk from the Digital Equipment Corporation sent 400 electronic messages to potential clients who were using Arpanet devices. This may well be the first example of digital marketing via the Internet.
By the 1990s, email marketing was commonplace, but the volume of sales emails led to the term "spam" being used for the first time in relation to emails. After other privacy directives, in 2018 the European General Data Protection Regulation was brought in to safeguard user privacy, and has had consequences for email marketing and the use of website cookies.
In, 1989 Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, which worked over the existing Internet network. The first search engine, Archie*, appeared in 1990.
The first clickable webpage advert - also called a banner ad - went online in 1993, and was for a Silicon Valley law firm.
The user-friendly Netscape browser was released in 1994, and helped turn browsing into a widespread pursuit. In the next 2 years, the number of people using the web increased from 16 million to 70 million.
Around about 1994, the first online purchase was made - from some accounts it was a CD by the much-loved pop musician Sting.
In 1994 the Yahoo! search directory was launched, and search engine optimisation became an important consideration.
Around about 1994, cookies started to be used. Cookies are small data files that download to a user's computer. These can be used to track a user's browsing history, and then to serve up targeted adverts. The use of cookies would later be made more limited - and obtained consent required - by privacy directives.
The Google search engine went online in 1998. It was set up partly to counter the practice of webmasters using popular but sometimes irrelevant keywords to get a good search engine listing. This new search engine ranked websites mainly by how many authoritative websites linked to the site, so incoming links became an important factor for search engine optimisation. In 2000, Google AdWords was launched.
In 2001, the "dot-com bubble" burst. General excitement about the potential of the Internet led to many new companies being able to secure huge sums of venture capital to sell things via the internet - from clothing for humans to food for pets. Having spent the funding on technology and advertising before becoming profitable, many companies like boo.com and Pets.com and went bust.
In the 2000s, social media took off - LinkedIn appeared in 2002, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 - which resulted in users interacting and providing more data about themselves. All those platforms presented marketing opportunities for businesses, both free and paid for.
The video-sharing channel YouTube was set up in 2005. Many people now use YouTube as a starting point to research information on the web, so it's an important platform for digital marketing. It was bought by Google in 2006.
The first widely available smartphone was the iPhone, launched in 2007. By 2015, the prevalence of mobile devices led to Google to announce that its search results would favour responsive websites over websites designed solely for desktops. Also, the opportunity for promotion via phone text messages opened up.
The photo sharing app Instagram appeared in 2010, and 2 years later was bought by Facebook. In 2021 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was the new umbrella company name for Facebook and its associated platforms.
*Archive without the v.
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