Looking for Old Animated Vertical Ads?

[KatiePla.net]

Hey y'all! Lately I've been feeling nostalgic for vertical banner ads - the ones that used to be placed on the left and right sides of sites. I'm hoping to recreate some of these ads on my own site!

For reference, I'm looking for banner ads similar in style to this:



Old website ads, product ads, game ads, anything at all! If you have any to share, I'd be very grateful! 

[Dazhak]

Here are some I found!

[xixxii]

a little bit of poking around has helped me figure out that these ads are called "skyscraper" ads, and they're generally either 120x600px or 160x600px, so that's something to help with narrowing down searches at least.

you know, with this and this other recent thread about barbie banner ads, i've been frustrated that it doesn't seem like there's a good easy-to-browse archive of digital advertisements... anywhere?? i've been looking around for one and not finding anything dedicated specifically to web advertisements! which is actually kind of worrying to me, since that's a huge amount of cultural material to not have collected anywhere
there are lots of ads on various pages in the wayback machine of course, they're just scattered all over and kind of a pain to track down.

definitely keeping an eye on the thread - hopefully i am just doing a bad job of finding things!

given the difficulty i (and other people it seems!) am having finding stuff i think it might be worth starting up a page just for cataloguing web ads. since a lot of old ones are flash-based instead of images im not sure how easy it would be, but it's something i am thinking about now!

[KatiePla.net]

Wow thanks for the resources! I also think its concerning that there's no high quality archive for old advertisements.    I'm glad to have some others help aid me in my search. If I find any other resources, I'll be sure to post them here.

And as an aside, I do think the archival of "skyscraper ads" is an important task, and something that should be prioritized. I am not sure what goes in to web archival, as I've never done it before, but if anyone wants help starting this project, I'm open minded to learning and helping lend a hand! A resource for web banners and skyscraper ads feels important.  

[Dazhak]

And as an aside, I do think the archival of "skyscraper ads" is an important task, and something that should be prioritized. I am not sure what goes in to web archival, as I've never done it before, but if anyone wants help starting this project, I'm open minded to learning and helping lend a hand! A resource for web banners and skyscraper ads feels important.  

I would also love to help some sort of archive for older ads, but I am in the same situation of not knowing particularly much about web archiving... 

My suggestion is that we could start by browsing and collecting from gifcities and such, and then put the ads and some information on a page on the Everyone site, just as a humble start? yes or no?

[xixxii]

@Dazhak great idea! tadaa. ads page @ everyone site. go wild

since the everyone site doesn't have image hosting, i figured i would make a site specifically for collecting ads on... it will be adarchive.nekoweb.org/. it'll take a bit for me to bash out a little layout and figure out the best way to take submissions on a static site. maybe just a regular old tally form or email address or something, i dunno.

apparently you can let other people on nekoweb edit a site, so if anybody wants to help let me know what your nekoweb username is and i will add you! (i've never used nekoweb before so this'll be a learning experience haha)

idk how to do the flash stuff so it'll be just images from me. pobody's nerfect and all that 

[Dazhak]

WOOOOO!! Sounds great!

My sites is hosted on nekoweb, so i know how to use it. I'll make sure to add some ads (haha) to the everyone page when I find some time!

This is so exciting 

[Dreamwings]

Here are some I found!

OH MY GOD I REMEMBER SEEING THAT MIDDLE AD! CURSORMANIA! I SAW IT ON COOL MATH GAMES! I wanted to download it but then my mom said no because she thought it was a scam/adware (and she was probably right. I'm pretty sure it was like, adware and it sold the information on your computer iirc hah). If only small me knew about rw-designer.com. I'd have a field day. Not much has changed since then thats for sure. Still love custom cursors. Most underrated customization option.

you know, with this and this other recent thread about barbie banner ads, i've been frustrated that it doesn't seem like there's a good easy-to-browse archive of digital advertisements... anywhere?? i've been looking around for one and not finding anything dedicated specifically to web advertisements! which is actually kind of worrying to me, since that's a huge amount of cultural material to not have collected anywhere
there are lots of ads on various pages in the wayback machine of course, they're just scattered all over and kind of a pain to track down.

definitely keeping an eye on the thread - hopefully i am just doing a bad job of finding things!

given the difficulty i (and other people it seems!) am having finding stuff i think it might be worth starting up a page just for cataloguing web ads. since a lot of old ones are flash-based instead of images im not sure how easy it would be, but it's something i am thinking about now!

It's probably because back then, nobody gave a damn about them and, if anything, wanted them gone (of course this would be way before adblocking extensions would become more commonplace like today. Hell I don't think there would have even been extension stores around that time. Though I know there were extensions because toolbars and Flash Player existed, though Flash Player I guess is a different sort of extension. Not that they didn't exist, I remember the elementary school computers had an adblocker on them and I was amazed that no ads were showing on the pages at all. But it just wasn't as common as now.). After all, why would you archive something you find annoying and want to be out of your hair and maybe, even better, lost to the wind never to return? I mean, nowadays they're considered aesthetic but back then they CERTAINLY were not and looked super garish and ugly on a webpage (and like, 99% of the time were scams I remember, just like now. Some things never change.).
Wayback machine is definitely the place to start. Maybe if you find an old link exchange from back in the day you'll find other pages with adspace on them and be able to go from there (pretty sure a lot of those pages on the link exchanges were full of ads. Particularly the shadier ones.). It also might help to check big public sites that would have had those ads and scroll through the years. If they were popular, they would have been crawled a lot. And then it would give you a big variety of ads, possibly even different ones on the same day.

[halcybutton]

here's one i've found in some searches! i find this very interesting and definitely want to continue scouring to find some more, such a shame they seem to be so elusive to recover nowadays. hopefully we can find more ^_^ i plan on continuing to look but i doubt it'll be easy, just this one was a bit of a dig to find lol

[Dazhak]

i'm thinking of making a thread for the "ads" everyone page in the everyone website board. is it needed? could it bring attention to the page, so people with their own found ads can add them? or is it unnecessary

[tanuki]

i'm thinking of making a thread for the "ads" everyone page in the everyone website board. is it needed? could it bring attention to the page, so people with their own found ads can add them? or is it unnecessary

I think this sounds like a good idea; I have been looking for fake/old ads (especially vertical ones) to add to my website. Although, I am not sure if anyone here has been asking around for "fake" ads - most people seem to be discussing old ads. The closest that I've come too is from https://ytoo.org where they have some funny ads on the right-hand side.

It does seem to be fairly easy to find horizontal ads, but I think if we had a thread on here it will help focus around a particular era/style of ads instead of being a big unorganized collection.


Are there threads for blinkies/stamps/banners/etc.? I think it'd be great to have a thread on here for those kinds of web materials!!

[Dazhak]

I think this sounds like a good idea; I have been looking for fake/old ads (especially vertical ones) to add to my website. Although, I am not sure if anyone here has been asking around for "fake" ads - most people seem to be discussing old ads. The closest that I've come too is from https://ytoo.org where they have some funny ads on the right-hand side.

I haven't seen any request for fake ads either, and I mostly meant for the everyone page to archive old ads. But those ads on ytoo.org are so fun! I am surprised I have not seen that site before, it's so useful to have the "main sites" of the web revival community laid out all neat like that!

It does seem to be fairly easy to find horizontal ads, but I think if we had a thread on here it will help focus around a particular era/style of ads instead of being a big unorganized collection.

Yeah, the everyone page we made is pretty messy... If I knew how to best organise them I would have done it, but there are so many different kinds of ads   I am sort of secretly waiting for a bigger enthusiast who knows a lot about ads to bless it with proper sorting

Are there threads for blinkies/stamps/banners/etc.? I think it'd be great to have a thread on here for those kinds of web materials!!

It doen't seem like it! Of course my mind jumps to making a page on everyone for all the specific graphics one would need. I really like the idea of a page of stuff that people can contribute to, instead of an endless thread you have to scroll through when you want any graphics. But a thread would be useful to see if there are any others who are interested!

[xixxii]

wow, you guys added so many! thanks so much! i have now stuck a basic layout on nekoweb as well as saved the ads on the everyone site and mirrored them there. it's still a work-in-progress obviously - i need to sort the ads by size within the pages, and add titles, and all that sort of thing, but it exists!

behold, ads! 

if you have a nekoweb account and want editing access, just @ me here with your nekoweb username and i'll grant it to you! 

fortunately the images are quite small and not taking up too much of the free storage space yet!

[Dazhak]

@xixxii I would love to have editing access!! I am dogspit on nekoweb!