Publisher's Paradox: Inverse Inventory Principle The Inverse Inventory Principle: Display advertising rates are inversely proportional to the amount of content published on the Internet. The First Banner Ad As we head into 2014, I thought we should take a look back at the internet’s very first banner ad. In 1994, exactly twenty years ago, AT&T debuted the very first banner advertisement. That ad garnered a 78% click thru rate. (That’s not a typo, more than three out of every four people who saw the ad clicked on it.) How things have changed? Today, the average click thru rate for a display ad hovers around .17% - that’s not even a whole person.