dom.nn.ru was the website of the "Dom Reklamy" ("House of Advertising") ad agency, which operated in the Nizhny Novgorod nn.ru domain zone. The homepage title stated the owner directly: "Nizhny Novgorod full-cycle network agency 'Dom Reklamy'"[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot of the homepage is dated October 18, 2003[1], and the last is dated January 3, 2008, by which time the address no longer served the agency's page but a service notice[4].

What the homepage looked like

The site's structure was typical of corporate presences of the early 2000s: a top header with the agency's name, a vertical menu of ten sections, and a news column. The menu in the 2003 snapshot included the items "About Us," "Portfolio," "Services," "Articles," "Directory," "Partners," "Vacancies," "Regions," "Forum," and "Contacts"[1]. The set of sections shows that the site was conceived as more than a business card: alongside the portfolio and service pricing logic stood its own directory, a selection of articles, and a forum — that is, the agency was trying to hold its audience with content, not just a list of jobs done.

The presence of a "Vacancies" section in the main menu, alongside the portfolio and services[1], indirectly points to the nature of the business: agencies working with promotional campaigns require a constant intake of line staff, and the site was used, among other things, as a recruitment channel. The homepage's keyword list spells out the areas of work in detail: "advertising agency, dom reklamy, advertising, design, mass media, services, outdoor advertising, promotional items, promotion, PR, campaigns"[1].

A "network agency": a claim on the regions

The word "network" in the self-description referred not to the internet but to geography. The "Regions" section stood in the menu alongside "Services" and "Portfolio"[1], and the homepage's keywords listed a long string of cities after Nizhny Novgorod: Saint Petersburg, Yoshkar-Ola, Cheboksary, Ulyanovsk, Saratov, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, Penza, Ufa, Vologda, Cherepovets, Izhevsk, Kirov, Kazan, Samara, Tolyatti[1]. For a Nizhny Novgorod firm, this was an ambitious claim: the agency positioned itself as the hub of an interregional placement network rather than as a local contractor.

The news that stopped

The news column on the homepage shows clearly when the site stopped being maintained. In the snapshot from October 18, 2003, the feed was live and updated every two or three days: October 15 — "Russian advertising ar...," October 13 — "Psychology and advertisi...," October 10 — "The company 'May,' one...," October 6 — "On building a website, usu...," as the homepage reported[1]. In the snapshot from August 2, 2004, the top entries were already dated November 2003: November 13 — "Let's learn from mist...," November 11 — "Marketing will make us...," November 9 — "According to some res...," November 7 — "Practically at one and t..."[2]. The exact same four November entries still sat on the homepage a year later, in the snapshot from August 28, 2005[3].

So in terms of content the site froze in November 2003, but stayed up online without updates for at least two more years. One change did occur during that time: by August 2005 the "Forum" item had disappeared from the menu[3] — a section requiring moderation was removed, while everything else was left as is.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In our census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, the site is recorded under the nn.ru directory's classification. No audience figures survive for it: in the samples available to us from Counter.nn.ru, the address dom.nn.ru does not appear, so its audience cannot be assessed using the method of the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. Nor is it found in the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004 — neither by address nor by name[5]. That said, by the end of 2004 the homepage had already gone a year without updates, so its absence from the contest table looks unsurprising.

How it closed

The site was not taken down all at once: first it stopped being updated (November 2003), then it stood unchanged for several years. In the snapshot from January 3, 2008, the address served a page with a single line — "Hosting suspended"[4]. This snapshot marks the end of the address's history as preserved in the web archive; the materials available to us contain no information about where the agency moved or whether it is still operating.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2008 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)