Global Network Navigator

The Global Network Navigator (GNN) was the first commercial web publication and the first web site to offer clickable advertisements. GNN was launched in May 1993, as a project of the technical publishing company O'Reilly Media, then known as O'Reilly & Associates. In June 1995, GNN was sold to AOL, which continued its editorial functions while converting it to a dial-up Internet Service Provider. AOL closed GNN in December 1996, moving all GNN subscribers to the AOL dial-up service.

In September 1992, O'Reilly & Associates published the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. The company then created an online version using ViolaWWW, a web browser that introduced enhanced HTML features such as formatting, graphics, scripting and embedded applets, and demonstrated a kiosk version that was deployed briefly at the Computer Literacy Bookshop in late 1992.

In February 1994, the company's CEO, Tim O'Reilly, authorized a four-person "skunkworks" team, led by Dale Dougherty, and began planning for what would become GNN. The website was officially launched in August 1993 at Interop in San Francisco. A press release described GNN as

... a free Internet-based information center that will initially be available as a quarterly. GNN will consist of a regular news service, an online magazine, The Whole Internet Interactive Catalog, and a global marketplace containing information about products and services.

GNN was one of the pioneers of on-line advertising; it had sponsorship links by early 1994. According to Tim O'Reilly, the first advertiser was Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe, a now defunct law firm with a Silicon Valley office. (GNN was not, however, the first to do rotating banner ads; that was pioneered by HotWired in October 1994. Nor was GNN the first to do Internet advertising in general, since the email newsletter TidBITS pioneered that in July 1992.) That an online-only "magazine" would support itself by advertising, as GNN planned, was called "remarkable" in a September 1994 review of GNN.

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