This is a scary story. It reminds me of horror movie plots and the Twilight Zone. But the story must be told.
There are actually parallel internets. I shite you not. There are old internets that go back generations to the beginning of the web.
Think of a terribly old website that you’ve accidentally landed on recently. Something with dancing hampsters (remember AngelFire?) and dancing babies. Loud, ugly, square, broken image old sites.
Now most people just get embarrassed (or nauseous) and move on. But some people don’t know the difference between such a site and the internet we all use today. If you are new to the web, you have no idea what’s old and what’s new.
Here is where it gets so spine tingling-scary that it sounds like a made-for-wifetime TV: You weren’t just on an old, broken down site. You were on an old version of the internet. A ghost version, you might say.
The ghost sites link to other sites that were popular back in the day, many of which are still up for some freaky reason I will never understand. Still hosted. Still accepting visitors, subscribers and even money(!) like an old drift net on the ocean that catches fish but there’s no one coming to collect them.
If you are caught in the ghost web, and you don’t know from experience that the site you are looking at, along with all the sites connected to it, is circa 2001 simply because of the way pages were put together, you could surf for quite awhile without ever being on the internet that people are actually using today.
I have thought about this a lot and have a feeling that at any given time there could be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people surfing the ghost web at any given time. Buying outdated information products on a ghost payment link that is still working and still filling someone’s bank account.
And that’s where it gets really REALLY creepy…
There are people still working on the dead net. Their sites are not abandoned, they just look like it. Sort of like the little old lady who refused to move when her town went bust and now lives in a house with no lights, water, or heat… with 50 cats.
Where is gets dispicable is when people working the dead net, selling outdated products and services like FFA page systems and classified ads, take advantage of the net-newbies who don’t know they are lost on a network of sites that the real web has long left behind.
People are still selling training materials on SEO that went out of fashion 5+ years ago. They are selling them on the dead net to people who don’t know the network of sites they are surfing are all dead and gone.
It’s like the typical horror story where the hapless traveler pulls off the highway to drive the old Route 66 for nostalgia’s sake and ends up in a town the world has forgotten. The people invariably try to eat your brains and literally bleed you dry. All while the outside world, who travel on the new highway that bypassed the town and ran all the businesses away, is oblivious to your plight.
To me, the people who keep up super old sites with ads for products that may or may not even exist today (but many do and the payment and fulfillment systems are still working and still trickling money into someone’s account) it’s all just evil, weird, and fascinating.
How to surf the dead web
I’ll give you a set of links that will allow you to access hundreds of “historic” web marketing sites selling contraptions and snake oils as fantastic and absurd as the potions and “high tech” items sold in the 1800’s.
From these links you can enter a lost world where uninitiated newbies get caught like ghosts in horror flicks who don’t know they’re dead, wandering around a world they think is real.
Portals to Another World
http://www.worldmall.tv/ultimate_advertising_directory.htm (Note the reminder to do Ctrl-D to bookmark the site, lol) Note also the links to FFA advertising (with payment links on referred sites still working and still trapping people into a marketing tactic that lasted a whole 5 minutes on the web – 8+ years ago.)
And who can forget MPAM advertising? If you don’t know what it is, don’t investigate unless you are the type of person who likes to go through old houses to experience what living in the 1700’s was like. Leads to a page that still accepts list subscribers and, I’m sure, payments. An old drift net floating on the ocean currents dooming hapless fish, dolphins, and sharks to a miserable death.
The above sites aren’t even close to the super old historic web marketing sites below:
Here is an ancient classified ad for a program I joined as a newbie around 1998. I know the guy who started it (dude – look how things have changed!) and I am sure nothing here results in a live payment link since it was all run through a payment system that doesn’t exist today. Wonder how many millions of these classifieds are still live and around today duping people into surfing the dead web?
Well let’s check. Classified advertising was all the rage on Web 0.1.1 and people paid fantastic sums of money to put up ads where no one would ever find them. This stuff still exists and they are still taking peoples money!
This is a weird, twisted freak of old and new. This site has old doorway pages crap offered in the pitch with rather newfangled technology mixed in. Try to leave that page and watch the popup come up based on your mouse movement. That’s actually kind of new tech which means this is one of the guys profiting from dead technology. (Well, I highly doubt he’s raking in the dough, his compete rank is through the floor.)
That dude is still limping along on the dead web! Like the ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead and should head toward the light.
How to get deep into the dead web
All you need to do to become a dead web sleuth is do a search on your favorite marketing term of today, like website promotion, in Google and ignore the first 100 pages of results.
Get into the archives and pull up some incredibly historic marketing sites, many of which still operate as if there are visitors to service and money to gather for products and services that the web has almost completely forgotten.
Here is a site I pulled up on page 37 of Google for “website promotion.” They offer Yahoo/Overture ad optimization if you’re game. This stuff gets ridiculously funny after awhile.
Check out their “full color printing!” service tab at the top of that page, lol. Remember when people didn’t know that making a good impression with a paper business card was good for business? Or heck, remember when printing color on business cards was actually like – “wooooo!”
There are scores of ebooks on SEO still for sale today on the web even though they talk about FFA page advertising as a link building model. There are gazillions of abandoned classified sites, web ring sites, and forums with links to the dead web littered throughout, waiting for you to explore them like an old ship wreck.
You can actually go and strike up conversations with people who don’t even know they are on the dead web. Try to engage someone in a discussion of the benefits of Free For All advertising and see if they actually bite. What a hoot. Especially if it is a dead web merchant who wants to sell you and FFA page. Ask if he takes golden dabloons or even farm animals as payment.
Who’s Responsible for Cleaning Up The Web?
Doesn’t it seem like someone as fanatical as a Ron Paul supporter about “litter” on the web would be crying out for some kind of regulation against hosting companies keeping up sites that are 5-10 years old that haven’t changed or been logged in to by their owners for years?
So what if someone is still paying their hosting fees to keep the site live? If a picture of the web was possible, it would look like the infield of the Indy 500 the day after the race. Budweiser cans, diapers, bras, pants, car parts, broken frisbees, lost dogs, and overflowing porta potties.
The difference is, no one is trying to sell you tickets to the race the day after the Indy 500. The shops are closed. On the ghost web, many of the shops are still open and still attracting the occasional newbies what wander down a dark alley on the web, find themselves travelling back in time, and even paying for things that will do them no good on the live web.
Really Old, Actually Dead Sites
Here is a site that has screen shots of totally dead sites. Thousands of them. It’s call the museum of i-failure and it’s a relic itself, claiming to be tracking dead sites since 1996.
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Have you bought a “ghost marketing product” lately that you later found out was based on tactics we used 5 years ago?
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