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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Weird Wednesday

Weird Wednesday: Internet advertising


Remember back in the early days of the web when all you had to do was punch a monkey to win? Millions of pummeled simians later the online ad industry had to evolve... And evolve it has, with two distinct paths for display advertising:

1. In-your-face gigantic ads or ads that "do something" significant to distract you. Common examples include full-page "interstitial" ads that interrupt your browsing, anything that flies around the screen or busts out of its little box or anything that expands when you hover over it.

2. Creative, "viral" ads that are so clever, weird, gross or unusual that they are passed around despite their more than obvious marketing nature. Let's look at some of these, shall we?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the latter. Unfortunately tracking down "weird" ads isn't easy. Ad campaigns, by their nature, are dynamic and ephemeral. The Internet Archive doesn't cache dynamic ads, either, so some of those golden oldies may be lost forever. If you snag a pic, please let us know in the comments.

A few of the more clever online ads are presented for your consumption on the next page.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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