Good old (dot-com) days
Earlier this year, Matt McAlister uploaded pages from the January 1998 prototype issue of The Industry Standard, the late, great, fattest magazine of Web Bubble 1.0. See the pages here
On this page, Michael Tchong worried about whether online advertising was flattening out when, toward the end of 1997, it was looking as if web advertising would not attain its first $1-billion dollar year after all:
“Although the industry had hopes of topping $1b in sales this year, it now looks like revenue may reach only $870 million. Are advertisers growing disillusioned with the benefits of Net advertising?”
The Standard, meanwhile, grew fat and happy, throwing legendary parties from rooftop to rooftop, coast to coast. At Real Media (later to become 24/7 Real Media) we contributed to the fun with 2-page magazine spreads and web ads that showed the little Real Media people jumping from a right-rail ad to the “attractor” banner at the top. Below are some I dug up for this little retrospective.
All the “action figures” in these ads were Real Media employees. We had fun doing the shoots and seeing ourselves in ads on bus shelters and billboards in New York and San Francisco in those good old dot-com days. Alas, the agencies we worked with – Mezzina, Brown in New York and Lot21 in San Francisco – are also gone. 
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