The World's First Banner Ad Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary

An anonymous reader shares a web site remembering October 27, 1994 as "the day that Wired Magazine flipped the switch on its first website, hotwired.com, starting a revolution in web content and advertising that still reverberates today." This site is dedicated to showing off one of the ads that ran on that site. No, it wasn't the "first" as there were a handful of other ads that ran on various sections of hotwired.com. This site is also here to tell the story of how that ad came to be, how it succeeded beyond anything we had imagined, and how we tried to set an example for how corporations could communicate with their audiences.
The site was created by two of the people originally involved in that ad campaign, and it even simulates the landing page that AT&T's ad would've taken you to back in 1994, including its announcement that "For those of you unfortunate souls who don't yet have fiber to the home, we've tried to keep file sizes small and download times short...."

CmdrTaco once wrote of the ad that "It's ugly, but no animation, no popups. It makes me a little nostalgic."

Archive.org's earliest capture of HotWired.com is from three years later, in 1997.

What are we “celebrating”, exactly?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The start of the web’s downward spiral into a cesspool? Are we gonna “celebrate” the first Flash ad, at some point?

Re: What are we “celebrating”, exactly

[phantomfive]

I think we are remembering the era when websites still had ads (smiles at adblocker)

Re:

[AndyKron]

Thank to AdBlocker I can no longer watch TeeVee or listen to the radio

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I'm using Vivaldi at the moment and it's doing a tolerable job of blocking ads... Except here. Good times

Re:

[alvinrod]

Maybe you missed it, but it seems like a few people actually tried something that almost boils down to just that. See the recent articles on Slashdot: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/14/0130244/was-flash-responsible-for-the-internets-most-creative-era [slashdot.org] and https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/14/012233/wired-remembers-the-glory-days-of-flash [slashdot.org].

Anyway, the web's downward spiral into a cesspool is regarded as having started a year prior to 1994 [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure all of that's debatable, but banner ads just see

Re:

[Rockoon]

The introduction of banner ads meant we were never more than 3 clicks away from a porn site.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Re:

[nospam007]

"The start of the web’s downward spiral into a cesspool? Are we gonna “celebrate” the first Flash ad, at some point?"

Sure, the first spam, the first scam, the first Nigerian Prince...., who should be King by now, no?

Re:What are we “celebrating”, exactly?

[markdavis]

>"The start of the webâ(TM)s downward spiral into a cesspool? "

Indeed. Had it stopped at simple, small, static banners, it would have been great. But no, they have to be huge, then ANIMATED (OMG how annoying), then mouse-over, then pop-up, then delayed pop-up, then fly-outs, then held to the page so they never scroll off, then video, then autoplaying video/audio which ALSO follows down the page. You end up with seizure-inducing, s-hole wasteland field of moving, distracting crap that uses tons of CPU, memory, battery, screen space, and bandwidth, and a tiny little area of content that is then broken into several pages (which has to be low-contrast, of course, like dark grey on light grey). And that is just the appearance- nothing about the tracking destroying privacy and security.

I have to use lots of settings and addons just to make using the web at all bearable. Each year I am losing a little bit more of the fight.

Those were the days

[Presence Eternal]

Remember cancelbots? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

25 years later

[Calydor]

Still no fiber to the home.

Re:

[jon3k]

I have two different fiber options, both Google and AT&T, both right at $70/mo with no cap. Comcast is here too and offers gigabit (down only of course) via coax, but who wants that? There are a surprising number of people in the US [broadbandnow.com] who have access to fiber-optic internet in the US.

Re:

[AndyKron]

Thanks for the random comment

Authenticity

[Alwin Henseler]

While I appreciate preserving bits of history (regardless of how one feels about the subject today), if you make the effort you might as well preserve it properly then. From the site's home page:

Yes, this site is supposed to look this way. After all, this is what most web pages looked like back on October 27, 1994

Just for kicks, checked its HTML source and saw this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="oldskool.css" type="text/css">

Wikipedia: CSS first proposed in October 1994, initial release in 1996. So very, very unlikely the historic page used CSS like here. Oops... I mean: if authenticity is what you're going for,

Re:

[ELCouz]

There is also PNG image file and a google font included in the source... this didn't even exist back in the days.

Re:

[alvinrod]

Modern browsers can handle a bit of quirks mode / tag soup.

I think most of them outright refuse to render the blink and marquee tags that were pretty popular back in the day. I guess you can use CSS or JavaScript to essentially recreate them, but I don't think you'll ever get a perfectly authentic experience. In some cases [wikipedia.org] I think we should be glad of that lack of authenticity.

I liked nerdy BBS's

[AndyKron]

The first time I saw a banner ad I thought "gee, the Internet might become popular with the general public". Now I wish I was wrong. I liked nerdy BBS's

Re:

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Yeah I also look back fondly on my BBS days but I don't think I could go back. Sure there's a lot of sewage on the net today but there's also the sum total, or near enough, of human knowledge at your fingertips.
OTOH, on BBSes I could download zero day warez for my 64 all day long.

Also known as the day the internet died

[wakeboarder]

The internet used to be free, now ads turn a normal webpage into a cesspit of tabloid ads that are useless

Re:Also known as the day the internet died

[Opportunist]

Most of all, it used to contain useful information. Now all you get is pages that want to BLOW YOUR MIND with 10 things you never expect (and number 5 is something you thought is impossible!).

25th anniversary

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

of the internet starting its unstoppable fall into utter crass commercial mediocrity.

But hey, at least it was just an ad and nobody was stealing your personal data and putting you under surveillance back then. It's almost worth remembering fondly... or not.

Re:

[Damian Harrison]

Modern PR specialists are too carried away. I don't know a person who wouldn't use Adblock now. Do you know what is gaining popularity again now? Good old advertising signs are coming back - https://fortunasigns.com/servi... [fortunasigns.com] I believe that this is more effective since it isn't an intrusive advertisement. Particularly pleased with the imagination of designers to develop logos))

Tales of the Internet as we know it...

[AlejandroTejadaC]

That time before we learn that content published in the internet could disappear forever without trace.

Nostalgia all right, but not what they think

[samwichse]

Anyone else click the link, to be presented with a page that is superior to 99% of the websites currently out there? With a simple font and background color, text that reflows when the page width is changed, not rife with JavaScript and cross sites. With a single static ad. No animation. Links at the bottom are descriptive and not hidden in mouseover menus or icons. No social buttons.

Craigslist is still pretty good. I don't know if I can think of a second site off the top of my head.