Ghost Sites of the Web

Web 1.0 history, forgotten web celebrities, old web sites, commentary, and news by Steve Baldwin. Published erratically since 1996.

June 15, 2005

More Web Banner Ads From The Crypt

There's nothing more useless than old banner ads, and that's a large part of their charm. Here are a few that I whacked many years ago and stored on a Zip 100 drive. Don't go looking for them anywhere else on the Web - they're long gone. But on Ghost Sites, they'll always have a home!




What in the heck was the "VeonZone?" I've never seen an "interactive video." Did they really exist? We may never know. The site is gone and even the Internet Archive doesn't have a human-parsable copy.




Venturesurf -- no, this one doesn't exactly ring a bell. What was "Venture Philanthropy?" How could one surf from "success" to "significance?" Darn - the Internet Archive didn't archive this one either. Brewster Kahle - your miracle machine is broken!




Here's a really interesting one - a banner ad for Inside.com, Kurt Anderson's spectacularly ill-fated media super-site. I plan on writing something about the highly hubristic Anderson in the near future (although I'm not sure he rates mention in the "Forgotten Web Celebrity" series). In the meantime, you can look at some screen captures I made of inside.com here, here, here, and here. Take a good look -- this site was powered by the stuff that dreams are made of.




At last, an old banner ad that links to a still-functioning Web site. Hmm - maybe the fact that its business is sending your job overseas has something to do with its continuing viability. Sigh.

Got an old banner ad that's gathering cyber-moss on your hard drive or an old CD-ROM disk? Let me know about it. There's a compelling story behind each one of these old 468 x 60-pixel wonders!



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