A Critical Political Economy of Web Advertising History

Abstract

The rise of web advertising over the past two and a half decades has been meteoric. Global online ad spending has risen steadily since the World Wide Web’s creation, proving resilient in the face of two financial crises and generally tepid economic growth. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company (2015) predicts that ‘digital media’, which includes the web and mobile platforms, will account for more than 50% of worldwide advertising spending by 2019. The web has been the primary carrier of digital advertising and its expansion has been accompanied by a great build-up of consumer data collection capacity. For a majority of users, pervasive advertising and monitoring are now default components of web engagement.