NetGravity

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

~ the obituary ~

On a 33.6k modem you learned the order in which a page arrived. Text first, then the images filling in one band at a time from the top. Somewhere in the middle of that came a rectangle fetched from a different machine than everything else on the screen, and frequently it was the last thing to finish, and you sat there watching a progress bar for an advertisement you had already decided to ignore. That rectangle needed software behind it, and for a few years in the late 1990s the software was usually NetGravity's.

John Danner and Tom Shields founded the company in San Mateo in 1995 and shipped AdServer in january 1996. The idea reads as unremarkable now, which is the measure of how completely it won. Before it, a website that sold advertising had to hard-code the banner into the page or hand the whole business to an outside network. AdServer was a program the publisher installed and ran themselves, so the page called out for an ad at the moment of loading and the server decided which one that particular reader should get.

Yahoo ran it. So did a few hundred other publishers, and Shields eventually put the number of customer ad operations at over three hundred. The company went public on 11 june 1998 at $9 a share, the bottom of its range, raising $27 million at a valuation of about $119 million. It was a real business with real revenue in an era not otherwise known for either.

None of this was a product anybody chose. You never picked NetGravity, you were served by it, which is the part I find worth marking. The infrastructure decisions that shaped what the web became were mostly made by companies whose names no reader ever saw, in software that arrived on a CD with a license agreement, sold to about three hundred people in the world who had authority to buy it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it invented ~

The argument of the late 1990s was where the ad decision should happen. DoubleClick's answer was that publishers should hand over the inventory and let a network sell it across thousands of sites at once, which paid better and cost the publisher its independence. NetGravity's answer was that the publisher should own the machinery and keep the relationship with the advertiser.

Both answers required the same underlying trick, and it is the one still running the internet: a small file left on the reader's computer so the ad server could tell that this browser had been here before. A frequency cap, or counting a real person rather than a page view. Both need identity, and identity in a stateless protocol means a cookie. The ad server is where the web learned to remember you.

~ what it became ~

DoubleClick and NetGravity signed a merger agreement on 13 july 1999, valued then at about $530 million in stock, and completed it on 26 october. NetGravity shareholders got 0.28 DoubleClick shares each. DoubleClick's stock had run so hard by the closing date that the same deal was worth closer to $650 million on paper, which tells you everything about what kind of money was being used to buy things that year.

The software did not die with the brand. AdServer was renamed DART Enterprise and stayed in publishers' machine rooms for over a decade, carried along when Google bought DoubleClick in 2008, long after anybody using it could have told you where the code originally came from. NetGravity got four years as a company and its product outlived it by more than ten.

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