LinkExchange

» see linkexchange.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

linkexchange showed up in my line of sight around 1999, on the personal pages of forum users who had geocities or tripod homepages with a small two-line linkexchange banner pinned to the top. i was on a 33.6k modem in turkey then, the banner usually loaded fifteen seconds after the rest of the page resolved, often as the last thing to render before the browser timed out. you did not click the banners. you scrolled past them. the only people who really paid attention to the linkexchange network were the page owners trying to game the credit ratio.

linkexchange was founded in march 1996 by tony hsieh and sanjay madan, two harvard graduates working out of san francisco. ali partovi joined a few months later as the third partner. the product was simple: you put a small banner ad on your homepage that promoted other linkexchange members, in return the network served your own banner on other member sites at a fixed exchange ratio of two views shown for every one view earned. the remainder went into a paid inventory pool that linkexchange sold to advertisers.

the network grew with the personal-page web through 1996 and 1997. by the time of the microsoft acquisition in november 1998 the network had around four hundred thousand member sites and about one hundred employees. microsoft paid 265 million dollars in stock for the company, in what was at the time one of the largest acquisitions of a pure web property. hsieh left a few months after the deal closed with a portion of the proceeds and used the money to seed a shoe-and-clothing site called shoesite.com that became zappos. the rest of the story is in his book.

microsoft folded linkexchange into a small-business services product called bcentral and let the banner-exchange network operate as a sub-feature. the product continued under bcentral branding through the early 2000s, the small-banner ratio model never adapted to the rise of google adsense, which launched in 2003 with a different economic model that was strictly better for the same kind of small-publisher audience. linkexchange stopped accepting new signups on november 15 2006 and stopped serving banners on june 4 2007. eleven year run.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

linkexchange was a banner-ad cooperative for small websites without ad budgets. you signed up, you got a snippet of html with a banner-rotation script, you pasted the snippet into your homepage at a place that would be visible. the network tracked impressions served on your page through the rotation script, every two impressions you served earned you one impression of your own banner on someone else's page. the gap between two-for-one served and one-for-one earned was the inventory linkexchange sold to paying advertisers as standard banner buys.

the format was the iab 468 by 60 banner, the rectangular ad slot that had defined web advertising since hotwired's first banner sale in october 1994. the size was small enough to fit at the top or bottom of a personal homepage without dominating the layout. the cooperative model worked because every member was a publisher and an advertiser at the same time, which solved the chicken-and-egg problem of getting inventory and demand on a new ad network. the math was straightforward, the network grew on the strength of the personal-page web boom of 1996 to 1999.

~ what carried over ~

the linkexchange banner ratio was the model that defined the small-publisher web ad economy before google adsense made it obsolete. when adsense launched in march 2003 with a contextual-text-ad product that paid in actual cash per click rather than reciprocal banner impressions, the linkexchange-style cooperative model lost its purpose almost overnight. a small-publisher could earn dollars instead of trading impressions, the conversion was direct and quick. the linkexchange network kept running for another four years on the inertia of legacy publishers but never grew after 2003.

the parts of the story that outlived the product are tony hsieh's later trajectory and the harvard cluster that produced the founders. ali partovi went on to co-found code.org. hsieh sold zappos to amazon for 1.2 billion dollars in 2009 and died in 2020 after the downtown project years in las vegas. the 265 million dollar linkexchange exit in 1998 was the seed money for all of that. the banner-exchange network itself was the thing nobody really remembers, which is fitting since nobody really clicked on it either.

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