AdCritic.com

» see adcritic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

AdCritic.com opened in 1999 and did one thing. It kept television commercials in a library you could search, and it let you watch them whenever you wanted, for nothing. That sounds unremarkable now and it was close to unthinkable then. Advertising was the thing you sat through on the way to the program. AdCritic made it the program, and the logo said so plainly: CHOOSE YOUR ADVERTISING.

The operator was The Ad Critic, LLC, working out of Detroit, and what it built was two audiences wearing the same login. One was ordinary people who arrived for the Super Bowl spots and stayed for the European car ads that never aired in America. The other was the trade. By the end the site counted 200,000 registered accounts, over a hundred agency clients and roughly 40,000 advertising professionals coming through every month. For a business whose practitioners had spent decades watching each other's work on reels mailed between offices, that second number was the actual product.

The traffic was also the thing that killed it. Every view meant a video file leaving a content delivery network, and the network was Akamai's. The bill ran past $50,000 a month. No revenue model ever showed up that could carry it, so at some point AdCritic simply stopped paying, and Akamai did what a vendor does with an account that stops paying. On 18 December 2001 the shutdown turned up on Slashdot and on Techdirt within hours of each other. The site was already dark by the time either of them posted.

I was seventeen that month, on a 56k line in Turkey, and a product whose entire substance was downloadable video was out of reach whether or not I knew it existed. The thing that killed AdCritic is the thing that kept me outside it. Serving video to a stranger in 2001 cost real money per stranger, and a stranger on Turkish dial-up took a very long time to finish becoming one.

~ the case file ~

~ the bill ~

The arithmetic of AdCritic is the arithmetic of every free video site before advertising learned how to pay for video. Success made the expense worse in a straight line. Ten thousand more users meant ten thousand more copies of a QuickTime file crossing somebody's backbone, and the only people with an obvious reason to fund that were the agencies whose work was being distributed, who were not being charged anything.

Two things had to exist before this could work and neither did in 2001. One was a viewer who could absorb a video stream without noticing. The other was an ad market willing to attach money to a video impression. Both arrived within about four years of the shutdown. AdCritic was early enough to prove the appetite and too early to collect on it.

~ the goodbye page ~

The farewell is one of the better ones in this graveyard, mostly because the people who wrote it were angry and funny at the same time. The browser title read AdCritic.com: All Ads, All The Time, Just Not Right Now. Under the logo sat a line of copy in the house voice, Just Choose It Later, and then the headline: AdCritic.com is Offline until further notice.

Below that sat a link asking Why Is AdCritic.com Offline, next to one labeled Acquisition Opportunities, which is a shutdown notice doubling as a for-sale sign. Further down, a CafePress store selling AdCritic merchandise with free shipping over fifty dollars, annotated: No Profit On These, Inventory Liquidation Prices. At the bottom, in italics, a seasonal greeting signed by The Unemployed AdCritic.com Staff, followed by thanks to the folks at Oneway for hosting our sorry butts. The copyright line underneath read 2001 by The Ad Critic, LLC DBA AdCritic.com.

~ what happened to the name ~

The Acquisition Opportunities link worked. In March 2002 the Ad Age Group bought AdCritic.com, and the version that came back was not the version that went away. Access became a subscription, bundled with Ad Age's creative title, Creativity. The library of commercials that anyone could watch for free became a trade resource for the trade, which is the only configuration in which the bandwidth ever made sense.

The name lasted five more years in that form. In August 2007 the site was relaunched under the magazine's banner as Creativity Online, and AdCritic as a brand was finished. Type adcritic.com today and a server built on Jetty answers with a permanent redirect to adage.com/creativity. The address still works, which is more than most of this graveyard can say. It just stopped being an address for anything called AdCritic twenty years ago.

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