I did a quickie (and slightly cryptic) post a little while ago comparing old school comic book ads to Google Ads, but a post on Boing Boing about a man who bought a monkey via a comic ad got me to thinking some more.
No, I’m not about to go out and buy a monkey anytime soon, but I really think that Google’s advertising program is this generation’s version of the random comic ad, times a million – the barriers to entry are nearly nonexistent, the content can be equally ridiculous, and really, there’s only one tragic piece missing: years from now, how are we going to review this time in history?
Assuming some group out there is keeping track of a portion of the ads out there, which I doubt, there’s a whole new component of interactivity that’s missing. I don’t just want to know that someone advertised an eBay affiliate link for African Slaves (OK, in that case I don’t really want to know at all), I want to know what keywords led to what ads which led to what pages.
I want an Internet Archive for advertising, really. Who’s keeping track of the classic banners of days past? If this is the era of advertising-supported content, how will that be reflected in our archives of this particular time?
Of course, I don’t know what the Archive’s future is either, as things get more and more AJAXy and data driven. There’s less and less value that comes from scrapers these days as more and more content comes from embedded script and object tags. It’s kind of a shame, but I don’t expect (or particularly want) “we can’t archive it” to be a design constraint on innovation moving forward.
In 20 years, will we get nostalgic for nostalgia?
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