A look back at some retro web banner ads

As part of my fascination with the internet of the 90s and early 2000s I did some searching on gifcities.org - a site from archive.org that hosts a humongous collection of animated gifs ripped from GeoCities sites that were rescued when GeoCities folded. A few searches in and it wasn’t too long before I began to see some of the old banner ads that we saw so many of back in the day.

Here’s just a few of what I found

NB: The files included below are images only, but ad blockers will block some of them. I found this out the hard way, it was very confusing. To fully enjoy this post you may need to disable your ad blocker

Amazon.com

I can’t imagine many people anticipated that Amazon’s rise would have been quite so extreme. From book store to everything store and cloud service provider.

This one is focusing on books only, so it may be from Amazon’s earlier days:

And these two are talking about electronics. You now know where to go for your camcorders!

The Diamond Rio PMP300 was one of the first MP3 players from 1998, so that gives us a good idea when this banner was in use

Finally, we have an advert targeted squarely at Bono

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk is more pertinent to my shopping needs, but at this point in time it was still just about books

Comet.co.uk

Sticking to the UK, Comet was an electrical store that had branches all across the country until around 2012

MP3.com

MP3 files were the in thing in the late 90s, and mp3.com attempted to be the legitimate place for digital music. I remember seeing the banners everywhere but I never visited because they didn’t have the Linkin Park or Evanescence songs I was looking for.

Lycos.com

Lycos are apparently still running, but I remember them being one of the names trying to fight for you to use their search engine along with Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Dogpile (also still going!) and eventually of course Google

dynamicdrive.com

Dynamic Drive is still running and providing javascript utilities to add to your websites. With things like github it seems a little redundant in today’s world but it’s likely perfect for people just getting started and old web nerds like us! I think we will be taking a closer look at this site in the future

MSN Messenger

Finally, good old MSN Messenger