the heroic google

Remember those annoying "pop under" ads that used to plague so many websites? There are still a few around, but thanks to the free market, better advertising methods were devised that benefited bother viewer and seller. Google.com led the way:

Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the Google co-founders, were more receptive to internal suggestions that could not be found in a marketing textbook - like text-only ads. These could be created by a business of any size; the format would permit a business to try out hundreds, even thousands, of variations, statistically measure the results and see which ones drew clicks and which did not. This would please advertisers.

and success is copied:

Today, Yahoo and MSN serve up text-only ads in the same peripheral locations on the page as Google, and use an almost identical format. Like Google, they also are fighting the good fight against pop-ups, and forbid advertisers from linking to pages that will bop the user in the nose. Google's model is copied for a simple reason: its ads produce profits that prove that size does not matter.

The New York Times has a great article that explains it all, "How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web".