Free Ad Exchanges Throughout History
February 19th, 2008 by Philip KaplanI first presented Spottt to the public on Tuesday, September 18, 2007, at TechCrunch 40. And it wasn’t until a few days ago that we launched. But all the while many people have asked me, “has something like this been done before?”
Yes there has! But unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why we’re here :)
A little history
The original free ad exchange was called LinkExchange.com. LinkExchange was founded in 1996 (12 years ago!), in part by Tony Hsieh. Tony is now CEO of Zappos.com — and an adviser to Spottt.
LinkExchange worked similarly to Spottt, but used the more traditional “banner” ad size, instead of the 125×125 square used by Spottt.
Microsoft acquired LinkExchange in 1998, and subsequently shut it down during the first dot-com collapse. At the time LinkExchange was acquired, they had over 1 million participating sites, and were very successful.
All this in the years before blogs (and MySpace profiles, etc.) were invented!
We think there has never been a better time to bring back the free ad exchange. We hope you think so too.
One more interesting tidbit
The 8th site to join the original LinkExchange… was Ebay! In fact, many people credit LinkExchange as one of the main reasons why Ebay became so popular. Myself, I remember learning about Ebay from a LinkExchange banner, as did a lot of people.
Are you the next Ebay…?
February 19th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I remember LinkExchange. I found a lot of good sites through those banners. Haven’t thought about that for a long time. I don’t think most of those sites still exist even. I have a file with my bookmarks from over 10 years ago, none of the sites in there are still up. A few were taken over or moved. Not many.