Search Engine Advertising: An Overview from a Revenue Management Angle

After having been used by the military and the academia for several years, the Internet became mainstream in the early 1990s. Ever since then, Internet use has been spreading globally in leaps and bounds. The number of global Internet users was only around 16 million in 1995 and that figure has reached around 1.75 billion in 2008.1 Of course, it didn’t take too long for advertisers to notice this new medium that has the potential of reaching millions in a brand new way. In fact, online advertising (which we will use interchangeably with Internet advertising in this chapter) has been around since 1994. One of the first of such advertising efforts was in the form of banner ads — a few pioneer examples of this were the result of an advertising agreement between Hotwire and AT&T, and appeared online in October 1994.