In the aughts, websites like Yahoo had an entire sales force (as newspapers still do) that sold those little squares of characters and images directly to advertisers. Many a fax and email flew around just to sell one “insertion order,” in the industry argot (and a wonderful double entendre). The ability to target was nil; at best, one could indicate a certain part of the website for an advertisement to appear in (say, the movies section). Analytics and attribution—answering the question of who saw and eventually bought what—were equally nonexistent. The only difference between the Internet and
...more
Yahoos Ad platform was manual (physical sales ppl) with no targeting capability
