1. The Rise of Internet Advertising Nick Maggio

2. Bill Gross The mastermind behind the pay-per-click advertising First company was Gross National Product Started another company IdeaLab IdeaLab then generated many more companies.

3. Start of the Advertising The rise of the internet took off gradually in the mid 90’s Advertising starting to become more popular on the internet. Companies would pay tons of money for the outright advertising rights on a website. CDNow spent 18.5 million on rights with Lycos Preview Travel spent 15 million on Excite

4. Good idea Gross noticed that there was a significant difference in traffic between good and undifferentiated. Good- traffic that converted paying customers Undifferentiated- people who arrived at the site via spam or poor search engine results. Gross devised the plan to charge advertisers 5 to 10 cents per click

5. GoTo.com Created in 1997 It created a new model for the web Started the internet advertising per click. His vision was to have a search engine be able to have interested searchers He first started charging 1 cent per click, which he knew was well below what it was worth and what people would pay for it.

6. Overture In September of 2001, GoTo.com changed their name to Overture Their mission was to be the liaison between a company and their advertising per click. In 2001 Gross met with Page and Brin to discuss a possible ultimate merger, but the Google guys refused because they would never be associtated with a company who used a combination of paid ads and search results.

7. AdWords In 2002, Google came out with their own version of the pay per click, AdWords. Overture sued Google for patent infringement. They settled outside of court for approximately 2.7 million shares of stock which is about 290 million dollars. Overture was sold to Yahoo for 1.63 billion.

8. The aftermath Although Gross sold his company for less than what he could have gotten for it, he is one of the internets best innovators. Google benefitted greatly from his idea. His contributions are great and he continues to look for the next new idea.

9. Snap Snap.com This is Bill Gross’ new and latest idea. He claims it is the solution to the search engine spam problem. His only motivation is Google. One interesting fact is that he uses a program that lets you preview the link.