About

Banner Depot 2000 is an interactive archive containing 22,915 web ad banners that existed on Chinese- and English-language web pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The banners are mined from archived web page snapshots of 77,747 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.

On this website, you 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.

You can also create collections of your favourite banner ads, and make banner ad poetry using individual frames from the banner ads, optionally with the help of GPT.

The full dataset of banner ads is available for download at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8408539.

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a switcheristic telecomunications project

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