mediacom.nn.ru — the website of the Nizhny Novgorod advertising agency OOO MediaKom NN (MediaKom NN Ltd.), which operated under the Mediacom brand[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated April 2004[1], the last one February 2010[4]. The agency was based in Nizhny Novgorod: in 2004 at 29 Ilyinskaya Street, postal code 603109[1], and by the end of 2005 at 30 Piskunova Street, postal code 603005[3].

What the site looked like

The home page was arranged with the utmost simplicity: a horizontal strip of sections at the top, duplicated on the left by a vertical menu, and a single long address to the reader in the middle. In 2004 there were six sections — “Home”, “About us”, “Services”, “Clients”, “Prices”, “Contacts”[1]. Directly beneath the header came the company details: the address, “tel/fax +7 (8312) 34-33-95” and the e-mail mediacom@nn.ru[1]. Below the menu sat two utility blocks labelled “Date” and “Visit counters”[1] — an obligatory element of site design at a time when the traffic counter was not a technical detail but public proof that the resource was alive.

What the agency did is conveyed most precisely not by the text but by the keywords meta field in the page code. It listed: advertising agency, WEB design, “outdoor”, neon, promotion, Sales Promotion, promoter, supervisor, merchandising, presentation, souvenir products, light box, sandwich-board sign, corporate identity, signboard, advertising campaign[1]. This is the complete set of services of a regional advertising agency of the mid-2000s — from the signboard above the entrance to promoters on the shop floor. The description field, meanwhile, was never filled in: it still held the template's factory placeholder, “Your Description”[1].

The only substantive text on the site was an address to the visitor that began with the words “Dear friends!”[1]. As the home page put it, the argument over whether advertising is needed at all was no longer relevant, and “advertising is definitely here to stay”[1]. It then explained how work with a customer was organised: the first step was a “briefing” — a confidential conversation that could also be conducted by e-mail — while the client had to understand what he needed, what the advertising campaign would give him and how much it would cost[1]. It was noted separately that there had been cases where a client, after a long conversation, decided that he did not need advertising for the time being — and that this was no cause for disappointment[1]. At the foot of the page stood the credit “© 2004 Ilja Kuznetsov”[1] — apparently the author of the site, given in Latin script.

The move and the new sections

The January 2005 snapshot shows the page unchanged: the same address on Ilyinskaya Street, the same telephone number, the same text and the same 2004 credit[2]. In nine months nothing on the home page had changed except the bullet character in the side menu.

By December 2005 the site had been noticeably updated. The agency had moved: a new address appeared in the header — 30 Piskunova Street — along with a new number, “tel/fax +7 (8312) 19-69-10”[3]. The menu had grown from six items to eight: “Advertising sites” and “Promotional campaigns” were added to the earlier ones[3]. The appearance of a section on advertising sites means that the agency also worked with outdoor advertising structures, and did not merely take orders for their manufacture. The address to the visitor, however, remained the same, word for word, and the copyright line still gave the year 2004[3].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site came to the attention of the regional community: it is listed among the resources of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004[5]. At the same time, not a single vote is recorded for it in the voting results, and no Counter.nn.ru rating figure for it has survived in our sample[5]. This is the typical position of a corporate site in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that period: the calling card exists, it finds its way into lists and directories, but it makes no claim on an audience and does not compete with the portals and entertainment projects that collected the votes and the top places in the counter. For more on the methodology and the composition of the sample, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

An indirect sign of the same thing is the agency's postal address mediacom@nn.ru[1]: the firm used a mailbox on the city portal rather than on its own domain, although it did have a domain of its own.

How it closed

Between December 2005 and February 2010 there are no snapshots preserved in our collection. In the snapshot of 14 February 2010 the address mediacom.nn.ru carries the default stub page of the ISPmanager hosting control panel: a message saying that the site has just been created and that the real content will appear later[4]. Such a page means not the launch of a new project but the opposite — the hosting space had been cleared and reinitialised, and the former site had disappeared from it. In all, seventeen captures for this address are recorded in the web archive index.

The snapshot of 14 February 2010 is the last one[4]. According to our own probe, the domain mediacom.nn.ru no longer exists. What remains of the “Mediacom-NN” agency is four saved snapshots of the home page, two city addresses, two telephone numbers with the 8312 area code and a list of services in the keywords meta field.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, January 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, December 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2010 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)