Major brand advertisers rejected early Internet advertising due to a lack of proven metrics.

Evidence

On later, closer inspection (some of it performed by federal law enforcement), much of AOL’s new advertising money was coming in based on methods that were unorthodox and unsustainable. It didn’t begin that way: in the early days, Berlow and Pittman tried the traditional sales approach. As the biggest “interactive” firm they figured they might land the whales of advertising: companies like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, General Motors. But there were no takers. Ad buyers at major brands can be conservative, and tend to favor established channels with well-worn metrics. And to be fair, there was at the time absolutely no empirical evidence that Internet advertising worked. As Michael Wolff wrote in the 1990s, “No products have disappeared off America’s supermarket shelves because of the Internet…no commercial fads have been created, and no buying habits have shifted.” AOL was well known, but it lacked the data that advertisers had grown to crave, and on the basis of which it made buys with the established attention merchants, like television networks and newspapers. Even with access to millions of minds, AOL advertising seemed to most big brands like throwing money into the vortex. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 730

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s historical grounding goal: the conservatism of ad buyers and dependence on well-worn metrics recurs throughout attention industry histories — mirrors how cable and early radio also struggled to prove value to advertisers. — connects to: The dot-com crash stemmed from advertisers’ inability to prove online ads worked — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 891; Online ad technology harmed consumers while failing to reward advertisers generously. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1083; Every major commercial Internet revenue model around 2011 was advertising-based — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1096

Broader Connections

• The dot-com crash stemmed from advertisers’ inability to prove online ads worked #corroborates (0.92) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 891
• Online ad technology harmed consumers while failing to reward advertisers generously. #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1083
• Every major commercial Internet revenue model around 2011 was advertising-based #qualifies (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1096