Computer Science 49S – Scribe Notes From Maggio Presentation –
The Rise of Internet Advertising
 Bill Gross – Pioneer in the online advertising industry. Created
advertising model “Pay-Per-Click”
 The progressively growing and expanding Internet in the 1990’s,
companies began spending extensive amounts of money for advertising
rights on web pages.
 Gross began to recognize the correlation of different types of traffic
occurring on web pages in relation to advertisements. From his
analysis he was able to reason that there are two types of traffic, good
and undifferentiated.
 Good traffic = traffic resulting in sale or gain for advertiser.
 Undifferentiated = viewing of a web page without real intent or actual
reason for viewing.
 Gross took his idea and created the search engine GoTo.com in 1997.
 GoTo eventually became Overture.com and it was one of the first
installments of a search engine creating profit through an advertising
model and payment method.
 Google somewhat adapted a similar advertising model/payment
method as that of Overture and came out with AdWords in 2002.
 Google skyrocketed past Overture and started on its path towards
being the best search engine. Gross was obviously not thrilled but still
has ended up very wealthy and still one the best innovators of the
Internet.
 However, even though Gross has been overshadowed by Google he has
still maintained a sense of hope and competitiveness. Gross has gone
on to create Snap.com where a user can visually preview a link before
the actually click and view the page.