A closer look
AT&T purchased the internet's first ever banner advertisement in 1994 for wired.com, and it achieved an absolutely mind-boggling click-through rate of forty-four percent. The ad ominously asked 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will,' which apparently worked flawlessly on a gullible early internet audience who had not yet developed the deep-seated psychological trauma required to ignore digital marketing. Today, marketers literally pop champagne if they manage to get a fraction of a single percent of users to accidentally click on their intrusive popup ads while trying to find the tiny invisible 'X' to close them. We went from eagerly clicking mysterious rectangles out of pure naive curiosity to deploying military-grade ad blockers just to read a simple recipe online without being aggressively sold a subscription box for razor blades
