The Super Bowl is America's most-watched TV event. Super Bowl LVIII in 2024 drew approximately 123.4 million viewers, with 30-second ad slots costing about $7 million. Whether to display a URL in those 30 seconds is literally a multi-million dollar decision.
URL history in Super Bowl ads closely tracks internet adoption. During the late 1990s dot-com bubble, about 70% of Super Bowl ads displayed URLs. The 2000 Super Bowl, called the "Dot-Com Super Bowl," featured 17 dot-com companies. Pets.com's sock puppet ad and E-Trade's "we just wasted money" ad are legendary. However, most of these companies vanished with the bubble, and their advertised URLs are now dead links.
By the 2010s, URLs rapidly disappeared from Super Bowl ads, replaced by hashtags and search keywords. In 2012, only about 25% of ads showed URLs. The shift came from smartphone adoption and "second screen" behavior. Advertising history books are available on Amazon.
In 2022, a watershed moment arrived. Coinbase aired a 60-second ad showing nothing but a QR code bouncing around the screen like a DVD screensaver. Scanning it led to a promotion page offering $15 in Bitcoin for new signups. The result was staggering: traffic crashed Coinbase's app. This ad is remembered as "the moment QR codes completely replaced URLs in Super Bowl commercials."
Japanese TV commercials followed similar patterns, shifting from "visit example.jp" to "search for..." and now increasingly displaying QR codes. URL display methods continue evolving within the constraints of limited airtime and screen space.