Well, let's see... as an archive as opposed to a community? I wonder if any major university with a strong (popular) marketing degree program would be interested in acquiring it as either an online museum or just as a resource?

Have you had any offers?

I don't know who would buy it for commercial purposes. On the one hand, there's a load of good material there but I'm unsure as to what the target market for the site would be. You probably get the hits, but I can't see it being a cash cow.

Hopefully some advert lover at google will see it and make you an offer that is not evil.

Also - Universities. That's a good idea.

Yeah, I've been thinking in that sort of direction too.

Here's some background, between 1998 and 2002 the archive was open to the public, people could embed the films or link to them, and anon people could comment at times (when spam was hard, only members with established identities could - I kinda went back and fourth on that). This was all good, but a tad expensive for me, but adcritic was out there and people had places to go for ads online, like. Anyway, one day adcritic sold out and my bandwidth bill instantly quadrupled and just kept getting larger. So, I had to do something - I decided to make it a small donation type of deal, and I began moving the films so people could no longer embed them in their blogs. It was a small 'get 30 days or one year, up to you!' kindathing, giving people a choice. I remember what it was like being a poor adstudent and I didn't wanna lock kids out, whereas adcritic became expensive and a year only subscription. Adforum and the likes were pay as you go as well. Still, people hated it and I got a lot of crap for it but I needed to keep my money to spend on me, for like, food and stuff, so. Everything worked fine, since now I could put ads up and not fret so much about money for machines and bandwidth. Spent any extra dough on bigger disks, and better hardware and could finally afford two cpu's so it just kept getting better. Fun right?

Well, yeah. But then youtube came along where people can embed films and that sort of crap and that's where I started out, so I'm now kinda pissed that I can't afford to do that. I want to! It would be FUN!

Oh yeah, didn't see you on preview seandy, I've had crazy offers from shady people that I can't take seriously so in a sense, no. Some people wanted to buy the domains only and such.

seany. - My cold is showing in txt now. Go figure.

Hey thanks this thread made me think out loud, so now I know that what I really want is to be able to set the ads free again. That would be interesting for ...

1) anyone who wants to sneak ads in the ads, or sell the adspace that the ads are. (wow, did this make sense? Media peeps anyway.)

2) Anyone who really wants to promote the format they are in (Apple)

and maybe...
3) advertising trade press?

Make sense?

I dunno, it seems like potential advertisers would perceive inherent diametric opposition to their goals in your userbase; on one hand some of the ads archived are examples of certain artistic success, on another hand the entire site seems to put the field in a (rightful, IMO) rather negative light. Maybe a University or commercial archiving service would be a good match, but I'm not so sure there either.