>>8869133>The easiest and fastest way to prove this, is too look up ad rates. You'll see they spike in 2010, as companies realize people are spending more time online.Yeah, as the other guy stated, ad companies were pretty late.
Most importantly: they actually needed to INVENT the way to monitor users and sell all the data they had collected. So that took even more years, ESPECIALLY after the dot-com bubble killed off many of the companies that were trying to do that and the companies that did survive needed to find investors after many idiots began to believe the internet was just a fad.
You have to remember that the internet was still new and companies like AOL changed everything by making internet service unlimited per month. Before AOL did this in 1997, most companies were charging people by the minute. So no one was prepared to handle the huge influx of users, which made hosting companies charge even more to handle all that data people were using from visiting their websites.
Literally overnite, companies realized there was even more money to be had by the amount of people who started using the internet.
So before 1997, you'd be right that the internet wasn't mainstream. Places like IRC, newsgroups, chat rooms and forums were ghost towns before unlimited became a thing.
Personally, i was already online since 1994 (got broadband in 98), so i observed all these things with my own eyes.
btw, the cookie wasn't invented until 1994 and didn't become widespread until like 1997.
Read more about how your privacy became violated and lawsuits were made into 2002 over their uses:
https://epic.org/privacy/internet/cookies/#doubleclick 
