The Changes in Digital Marketing Over the Last 10 Years

Whether you realise it or not, the digital marketing sector is always changing and evolving, as people’s interests and focus change all of the time. Things online go in and out of fashion and people are interested in newer and updated products and services. In this blog post, we will focus on how the Digital Marketing sector has evolved over the last 10 years.

The Early days of Digital Marketing

Before we get into it, let’s first answer the question: What is Digital Marketing? Digital Marketing is the use of digital platforms to promote products and services. The term ‘Digital Marketing’ was first used in the 1990s, with the launch of the Web 1.0 platform. This platform allowed users to search for information across the web, but not share it to other sites.

By 1994, this first clickable banner ad was launched by HotWired and this set off a chain reaction of more banners advertising different products and services.

In 1994 the Yahoo search engine was launched and ended up receiving almost 1 million hits in the very first year of its launch. The success of Yahoo encouraged changes in the Digital Marketing world, with the need for companies to start optimising their sites to rank higher on search engines to enhance their business.

In 1998, Google was launched and over a few years, search engines such as MSN and Yahoo started to become less popular. In 2006 search engine traffic increased by 6.4 billion in just a month, making Digital Marketing more prominent and more useful.

The first social networking site to emerge was MySpace, which launched in August 2003. MySpace paved the way for the popularity of social media sites today. Soon after the Launch of MySpace, Facebook was launched. With the emergence of these social media sites, people realised the business opportunities that came with social platforms.