Banner Ad Museum

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

~ the goodbye ~

The front page was black, with white text, and the only way in was a line reading CLICK HERE TO ENTER. Above it sat a 468 by 60 image whose entire content was the words "this is not a banner". Below it, in the same dimensions, the museum's own logo, red letters on a yellow field, built to look exactly like the thing it was collecting.

Behind the splash was a proper institution. The mission statement argued that no advertising format in history had ever absorbed this much talent per square pixel, and that a rectangle of 468 by 60 which has to carry a corporate identity and still earn the click deserved to be looked at properly. The collection ran past 3,500 banners. You could browse them by size or by industry, and the Flash and Java units had galleries of their own. There were international galleries, a best-of gallery for 1999 and for 2000, a page where you could submit your own banner for a test render, a guestbook, and a standing invitation for anyone with an idea for an exhibit to write in and curate it.

It was run by something called SNX, whose copyright line sits at the bottom of every page and about which almost nothing else survives. The contact address was [email protected]. In August 2000 the hit counter on the splash page read 006044.

~ the chronicle ~

~ inside the galleries ~

The sorting is the part that gives it away as a real archive rather than a joke page. Finance had enough banners to run to twenty-three pages. There were separate categories for food and beverages, for automobiles, for art and collectibles, for book publishing, for business to business. Somebody had sat down and classified several thousand advertisements by hand, in PHP3.

Two things were preserved there that almost nothing else kept. The first is scale: a 468 by 60 banner was a fixed, universal standard, so the whole collection is a controlled experiment in what designers do when the canvas never changes. The second is motion. Animated GIFs and rich-media units do not survive screenshots, and a lot of what made these ads work was the loop.

~ a museum with a hit counter ~

I came online in 1998 on a modem that crawled up from 14.4k toward 56k over the following years, and in that period a banner ad was not an annoyance you scrolled past. It was a measurable fraction of how long the page took. You could watch a 468 by 60 GIF arrive in bands while the text you actually wanted sat half-rendered underneath it. Later, in the internet cafes around 2002 to 2005, the machines were faster but the ads had grown into Flash with sound, and the first thing anybody did on sitting down was mute the box.

So a museum for these was a strange and slightly affectionate idea even at the time. The format was already dying when the collection was at its peak. The IAB had published new standards that moved the industry toward larger units, and one of the three headlines on the splash page in 2005 read "E-Commerce Report: New Alternatives to Banner Ads", which is a museum reporting its own subject's decline on its own front door.

~ the 404 ~

The Internet Archive was crawling banneradmuseum.com every few days through the summer of 2005, and the page came back at a steady 1,398 bytes every time. The last good capture is 29 August 2005. The next visit, on 24 September, returned 402 bytes of 404, and so did every visit after that for the next eighteen months.

Steve Baldwin wrote it up on Ghost Sites in April 2007, noting that the domain led nowhere and pointing readers at the Wayback Machine, which had done a first-rate job of preserving even the rich-media units. He was right, and that is where the collection still is.

The domain itself has changed hands repeatedly since. It answers today with a parking stub, which for a museum of advertising is at least thematically correct.

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