The history of Digital Marketing is a long and often untold story of innovation, progress and disruptive thinking. But to understand the history of marketing in the digital domain, one must first understand how we categorise the history of the internet. The internet is by far the most extensive collection of knowledge and history in the known universe. Each website is home to its own rich history of changes, comments, et cetera. In fact, if one was to go back to November 2020 in the Wayback Machine on this very domain, you’ll find a completely different layout. If you go back to 4 March 2000, you’ll find a completely different, and hilariously nostalgic, site.
Due to the constant changes of the internet, we categorise major events into distinct eras. These are displayed in the format “Web X.0”, used in a similar fashion one might compare the 60s to the 90s: a generalisation of the prevailing trends and culture of the time. Learn more about each era of the web, and the changes to Digital Marketing contained within, with the help of our experts here at Wildfire Marketing below!
Pre-Web 1.0: 1989 – 1990
When Tim Berners-Lee published his first website on his new creation, the World Wide Web, he had a very different vision of the internet than what we see today. The first web server was hosted by Professor Sir Berners-Lee at CERN. His site, which can still be seen today, was as simple as a site can be. No multimedia, plain background, plain text, and Hypertext links to a few other pages. As stated on the very same site, Berners-Lee’s ultimate goal with the World Wide Web was to provide a “…information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”.
Pre-Web 1.0, the internet was more of a library than the second reality we see today. Therefore, there was no Digital marketing to be seen.
Web 1.0: 1991 – 2004
As the internet gained more widespread use amongst the public and academic circles, the internet quickly became far more personal. Rather than the academic databases Sir Berners-Lee expected, and the social media profiles we use today, internet denizens used their own personal sites. These were typically built upon the infamous free hosting service GeoCities. These sites were incredibly static, and often resembled the very first site we saw before. HTML was still a fairly simple language, resulting in simple and often inflexible layouts. In order to make sites visually appealing, users would employ images, gifs and transparent spacer gifs.
In general, Digital Marketing shared far more similarities to physical marketing in the early days. Most traffic came from word-of-mouth, or an appealing “storefront” so to speak with images that drew users in. However, Google and its loyal, growing fanbase were quickly changing this. We’ll go into more detail on the history of Google/ SEO Marketing at a later date, but for now just remember that Google went public with their 2004 IPO, for $1.9 billion at the end of the web 1.0 era. They were already a big player in the early days of the web.
Web 2.0: 2004 – >2010
“The Web we know now […] is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear […] The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will […] appear on your computer screen, […] on your TV set […] your car dashboard […] your cell phone […] hand-held game machines […] maybe even your microwave oven.”
Darcy DiNucci “Fragmented Future”: January 1999
This optimistic quote serves as a strong indicator of what the world was to become in the Web 2.0 era. If Web 1.0 saw internet users set out on their own into this new frontier, Web 2.0 could almost be seen as the first great civilisations of the internet age. Social Media and User-generated content is the name of the game for web 2.0. From MySpace & Facebook to Wikipedia, web 2.0 marked the beginning of the website as a collaborative work – rather than a personal database. This was enabled by greater site functionality, from interactive elements such as the like button all the way to rich multimedia content such as videos and (mostly pirated) songs, the internet became a true platform for collaboration and free distribution of ideas and content. In a way, this was perhaps the closest we saw to Tim Berners-Lee vision of the World Wide Web.
Alongside this explosion of interactivity came commercial, and in turn public, interest. Google’s Pay-per-click advertising and PageRank algorithm earnt them massive success and propelled many sites that capitalised early to enduring fame. Sites such as Amazon and eBay began to take advantage of the internets trading potential, birthing eCommerce. Facebook quickly discovered that, by providing a social platform for free, they could garner a dedicated (if not addicted) userbase that would happily engage with commercial ads, earning businesses and Facebook themselves billions. Every forum, wiki and blog featured countless users and annoying pop-up ads, leading to businesses getting creative to stand out. Truly, web 2.0 was the beginning of Digital Marketing as we know it.
Web 3.0: approx. 2010 – ????
Web 3.0, interchangeably referred to as the ‘Semantic Web’ remains a nebulous concept. Whilst many would concretely say that we are in the throes of it, to define what it is proves difficult. In this way, web “versions” are very similar to a decade. A man in the 70s could easily confirm he was in the 70s, but to ask him to define the era before he’d seen its end would be practically impossible. Experts agree, however, that the general direction of Web 3.0 can already be seen.
The silicon valley giants of today have soured in public perception. Where once Google and Facebook were seen as fresh and spritely innovators, they are now seen as inefficient advertising monopolies, not to be trusted with your data. The main theme of Web 3.0 is decentralisation. This can be seen in the emergence of the Crypto-economy discussed last week, the growing difference between mobile and PC internet, and the growth of more insular social media and userbases.
The dominating platforms, companies and trends of web 3.0 remain to be seen. Tim Berners-Lee proposes the Pod System, Elon Musk sees net-enabled AI symbiosis on the horizon. Zuckerberg holds onto VR and social media. Whilst we may discuss the potential future of the net, and by extension Digital Marketing, in a future article: one thing is clear. Wildfire Marketing is the number one SEO Agency in Leeds, with countless years of experience in Social, email and paid ad marketing. For all your future digital marketing needs, trust Wildfire. Contact us today to begin your journey, and guarantee your place in the future of the internet.