Advertising is a fixture of the current Web. After all, two of the most prominent online companies -- Google and Facebook -- are really just advertising platforms disguised as a search engine and social network, respectively.

Despite the ubiquity of advertising on the Web today, it might surprise you to discover that sophisticated advertising technologies were developed relatively late. In fact, many of the biggest websites in the world -- with millions of active users -- were struggling to monetize on their traffic because they didn't have good ad serving platforms.

That began to change in 1996 thanks, in part, to a company named Accipiter and its founder, Chris Evans. Chris was one of the first people to identify the lacking ad software ecosystem for websites and launched Accipiter, which, for better or for worse, made online advertising easier, faster, cheaper, and more profitable.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.