ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an institutional perspective to the development of online advertising. It discusses the adaptation of advertising-funded commercial media business models to the Internet within wider debates about the commercialization of the Internet. The chapter considers advertising industry-specific developments that conditioned online media for advertising, and the development of a raft of new subdisciplines and textual practices, as part of a general expansion of advertising. It draws on the social contract between media and consumers that were set in motion with the commercialization of the Internet and which became explicit, and most visible, in the terms of service for social media. The chapter seeks to serve as a provocation to media, communication, and cultural studies to pay greater attention to the influence of advertising in accounting for Internet history. The history of online advertising is intertwined with the history of the commercialization of the Internet.
