From the article:<p>> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.<p>GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)<p>Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.