advertising

In computing, practice of paying to place information about a company's services or products in front of consumers. The earliest advertisers on the Internet used e-mail to distribute their information as widely as possible in a practice quickly dubbed ‘spamming’.

Much Web advertising is sold in the same way as advertising in traditional media such as the print and broadcasting industries. Advertisers pay to place a small graphic known as an ‘advertising banner’ on a particular Web page in a spot (usually the top) where users are expected to see it clearly and click on it to follow the link to the advertiser's own site for more information. More sophisticated systems allow advertisers and advertising agencies to track users' interests by watching which Web sites they visit and using that information to choose banners to insert which match those users' interests.