How 20 years of Google’s AdSense changed the internet

The targeted ad initiative was initially launched as “content targeting advertising” 20 years ago this month. The internet was never the same.

The pervasiveness of online advertising and its ability to pinpoint our habits and desires has been a point of contention ever since AT&T purchased the first banner ad on the internet in 1994. But while banner ads and the pop-ups that followed became a blight for users, it’s the current generation of advertising—those that follow us around the internet, hawking us products that it thinks we’ll like—that people find particularly troublesome. The reason those ads seem quite so creepy? AdSense, the Google-run tool that enables the owners of websites to display targeted advertising from clients who partner with the search giant, in exchange for a revenue sharing arrangement. It matches ads to content, based on the consumer’s interests. And it came into being 20 years ago this month.

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