How to stop worrying & collect early banner ads! - Richard Lewei Huang and Yufeng Zhao at !!Con 2024

How to stop worrying and collect early web banner ads! (and make art along the way!) Banner ads were an important early form of advertising on the web. In 2023, we built Banner Depot 2000, an interactive archive of 22,915 Chinese- and English-language banner ads from the late 1990s and early 2000s. We believe it is the largest publicly-accessible archive of early web banner ads on the Internet! We collected the ads by scraping the Wayback Machine using a dataset of historical URLs compiled from print “Internet directory” books from that era. On Banner Depot 2000, visitors can browse, search, and view metadata about each banner ad in the archive. Additionally, they can compose “banner ad poetry” using individual frames from the banner ads in our collection. The archive provides invaluable insights into the visual and commercial culture of the early web, as well as the evolution of online advertising. In the presentation, we will talk about how the project came about, how we built the archive, how the archive can support different kinds of research, and our future plans with the archive. Richard Lewei Huang is a PhD student and critical technologist at the University of Washington studying web archiving and internet history. Yufeng Zhao is an artist, technologist and designer whose work addresses data, imagery/language processing, and experience design. Both Yufeng and Richard are alumni of the Interactive Media Arts program at NYU Shanghai. They formed Switcheristic Telecommunications, an artist collective focusing on assembling and presenting atypical data. Presented at !!Con 2024 (pronounced, of course, "bangbangcon"!) in Santa Cruz, CA -- https://bangbangcon.com/ !!Con is a production of the Exclamation Foundation -- https://exclamation.foundation/ Video Production by Confreaks Follow Confreaks 👇 https://confreaks.com https://x.com/confreaks