Banner Depot 2000 (BD2K) is a multilingual archive of early web banner ads. The archive currently contains 22,915 unique banners, most of which in English and Chinese (both simplified and traditional).
Banner ads are a form of graphical advertisement prevalent on the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Imitating ads on magazines and billboards, banner ads usually feature flashy animations and gaudy graphics to attract user attention. While regarded by many users as a privacy-infringing visual nuisance, banner ads played an important role in shaping the early web experience for users across different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
On Banner Depot 2000, visitors can explore the entire banner ad collection, apply various filters to sort banners by language, color, and the year of their initial appearance, as well as search for banners containing specific keywords. Visitors can also create collections of their favourite banner ads, and make found poetry using individual frames from the banner ads, optionally with the help of GPT.
The banners are mined from archived web page snapshots of 77,747 historical URLs featured in six printed Internet directory books published between 1999 and 2001 in the United States and China. To create this archive, we retrieved available snapshots of these URLs from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We then extracted images adhering to common ad banner dimensions, and extracted text data from each image using optical character recognition.
Collaboration with Yufeng Zhao
