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‘Nerd-ad’ Collection

Depending on what webpages you visit or what kind of profile the ad networks have constructed from your browsing behaviour, you may or may not have seen them already: the typical advertisements that seem to be targeted towards a very specific audience. The ads often involve scantily clad women and fantasy themes, and are often found on ICT-related webcomic pages. Hence I dare say the target group is of the ‘nerdy’ type. Just to give these things a name I call them ‘Nerd-ads,’ even though many of them may just be targeted towards any (male) audience.

This is a collection, or perhaps an anthology of such ads that I started noticing around the year 2008. Partially to make fun of them, and also as a kind of service to whomever would be doing any research on this, I collected them on a webpage which vanished from the internet around 2011 and I mostly forgot about it until I stumbled on the files on my disk at the end of 2019. No longer having to consider the dreaded bandwidth limitations from back then, I resurrected the page on my main site and added the few extra ads I had collected in the meantime.

Obviously this kind of ad must have existed before 2008, but it seemed as if they were really booming at that time. Anyhow, in many cases it is obvious that the girls showing their cleavage in these ads, only serve to make the inconspicuous web surfer click the ad, and that there are no girls in the game being advertised. And no girls means none of the boobs as promised in the ads. This has been confirmed by some brave people who actually clicked some of these ads and tried the games. So forget about the games, the best thing about these ads are the ads themselves. Enjoy!

In case anyone is wondering, reproducing these ads for purposes of parody and research should be allowed under fair use laws. (No sane owner of any of these things should object anyway, because there is no such thing as negative publicity.)

Note: clicking a thumbnail will show the full-size ad, it won't bring you to the advertised webpage—many of the advertised things are probably dead by now anyway, especially when considering that many of these games were built upon the condemned Adobe Flash.

Because I am really curious what kind of ads this page in itself will trigger, I have created a specific ad unit for it.
Obviously if you are using an ad blocker, you won't see anything below, otherwise you may be lucky and get a brand new contemporary Nerd-ad here!

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