Sponsored Links emerged in 1998 when entrepreneur Bill Gross created the company GoTo with the keyword auction feature. After that, in 2001 it changed its name to Overture, at which point Google decided to enter into an agreement and paid $300 million to use them as its main advertising strategy.
From this moment on, competition arose from Cadê (a company belonging to Yahoo), which around 2002 began to sell sponsored links in Brazil. Consequently, in 2004, Overture was bought by Yahoo for a sum of $1.6 billion, and it was in 2005 and 2006 that UOL began launching sponsored links by subject profile and keyword, the so-called contextual links widely used, for example, in Google's display network strategies.