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Comment by rorylaitila | Hacker News Reader

I've been collecting and digitizing vintage print advertisements and publishing them (https://adretro.com).

I have tens of thousands of ads in the collection and it would take me many lifetimes to complete, but I've been using AI to extract and catalog the meta data. I can get through about 100 ads/day this way.

One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-comp-digi-comp-1-table-top...

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This is absolutely fantastic! What a treasure trove you're building. I love that you're using AI to help with the metadata extraction while still requiring the physical magazines, that's such a thoughtful approach to preserving these cultural artifacts. That 1968 computer ad that "answers riddles" is pure gold. Can't wait to see more gems as your collection grows!

Really cool project!

This brought to my mind to do something similar for digital advertisement, i.e. collecting various ads on the web and (automatically) label them through their metadata. I’m not quite sure yet we’re this could go. I imagine different categories: SaaS ads, video game ads, company ads, e-commerce ads, and so on, all categorized by company, date, site, etc. You could then see how ads changed for a specific tag/category over time or how ads for a single company, say SAP, changed.

Nice! And thank you. Yeah I am also cataloging all of the small ads, local or obscure. I want to see what trends I find in them. But they admittedly are not that interesting, unless you are looking for that product. The 1990s and after are not yet interesting to me either. I wonder if web ads will be interesting in 30 years...

Really cool collection! It seems like these are just photographed on a desk? Would recommend a flatbed scanner if you don't have one already!

Thank you! Yep, just photographed. I considered scanning but because of the volume I need to save every second possible of effort per ad. I have about 50k ads already and that is at best only 1% of the source material out there! Only full page ads are being published to the site but I'm cataloging every single minor ad too. I want to rig up a static camera and better lighting and I think that will get a better overall image quality.

I like this approach. I’d get too caught up in the perfectionism trap of trying to capture perfect images and would never actually reach the point of publishing anything!

The website is very nicely done!

Thanks! Yeah, I've had to scale back my ambitions a lot to even make a dent in the backlog...

> One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-comp-digi-comp-1-table-top...

Went to take a peek and my phone content blocker apparently did what it’s supposed to do…

I think it's a problem with the cache, seems to be intermittent I'll take a look.

Ads are like graffiti. When they first appear, they are a nuisance, a menace. But in the fullness of time they become interesting relics.

Yep! I feel ads capture a certain authenticity of the time. Changing aspirations, preferences and values.

Except grafitti is cool from the start, so, totally different

Super cool project! The website looks great too. Some analytics would be amazing. Not sure why but I think it would be really interesting to see the data in aggregate from various perspectives, e.g. what were the most popular add types by year or by publication.

Thank you! Yeah I agree, I'm hoping I'll see some interesting trends I can write about.

This is a really cool project! I would love to see a timeline view where the ads from particular decade are shown together, followed by subsequent ones!

Thank you, will do!

What a neat idea! I'd second the person requesting a timeline view.

Cool thank you! I'll work on this.

Is there a way to contribute? I have some old National Geographics I bought for 10 cents each a number of years ago. The old ads are one of my favorite things in every magazine.

Thanks for the offer! I need the physical magazines in hand to catalog, so if you want to part with them let me know. It can be a little pricey to ship a lot of paper but if you're up for it, my connect details are in my profile.

If you’re in the US, make sure you have people ship using discounted media mail rates!

Thanks, good idea

This is really cool! What are you using to digitize the ads?

Thank you! I've written a web application (I call the adverdex) to assist the process and automatically publish to the site. Magazines are inventoried, then camera images taken for each ad. Each image is cleaned up and cropped, then I use OpenAI to extract the brand, product, tagline and other details. Then I manually review and add more details for the published version. Only full page ads are currently being published but I intend to catalog every ad I encounter.

"answers riddles" - what kind?

there is a very large collection of old catalogs on archive.org for people interested in looking at old print advertisements

This is awesome-sauce! Any thoughts on an API?

Thank you! Yep I'm thinking about that. Any input as to the use case? The catalog is a full web application I've developed. I'm currently only publishing the best ads to the site for now to not clutter it up. But I could offer an API or access to the full metadata.

That’s really cool.

Indeed it is!

Thirded! Really impressive project. Very fun.

Thank you!

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