14 
Here’s the grandaddy that spawned the thing you guys like least on the Internet: ads. This artsy, graffiti’d print on a black background telling you to click “right here” is supposedly the first banner ad to ever appear on the Internet. It popped up nearly 20 years ago in 1994 and was an ad for an American network.
Joe McCambley, co-founder of The Wonderfactory, was the man who created the ad, thus the man responsible for birthing all those banner ads you love to use ad block on. The banner ad first appeared in October 1994 on a website called HotWired.com and was sponsored by AT&T to promote some art museums. It’s been used to varying degrees of success ever since.
Man, back in 1994, I’m pretty sure I would have clicked that thing just out of morbid curiosity. Now in 2013? I don’t even notice them anymore. [Business Insider]
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Catchy, even for today’s spam “click me” standard.
It didn’t even have to tell people they were the 1 millionth visitor to get them to click?
Pfft, people were so dumb back then
H, O, T, W, I, R, E …. Hotwire dot com!
(close enough!)
The source article says “hotwired” it was a web magazine from 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired
My apologies, think I just realised what you were getting at, been a long morning.
I do believe though that I’m the second commenter to admit they were wrong today
I’ll let you off, I just saw ‘Hotwired’ in the article and it instantly made me think of that god awful annoying ‘Hotwire.com’ TV advert, eughh … I feel dirty now
I know what you mean, it makes me cringe whever I see it, it was going round in my head for an hour earlier on