After surfing the web in 95 and finding Zeldman's ad graveyard, Dabitch got inspired to create her own corner of the web - and AdLand was born. The first Badland ads ended up on the same corner of her wee non-interactive webpage where she ad ranted and ad raved - the original concept was to compare ads similar to each other. It had a basic guestbook and she got a lot of email from other adgrunts around the planet. A lot. The site sections were called "debate" (that was badland), "adrants" (that was Dabitch's ranty posts), ad links and ad news. The basic skeleton of this huge site was already there from the start.
To amuse these new friends she called adgrunts, adlist was started in 1997. Ads were gabbed about all day on practically every continent (Still no penguin creatives on the list as of yet). And they still are. In 1998, Shannon started the the commercial-archive. Both the commercial archive and ad-rag moved to the same server in 2000 (as Shannon retired). AdLand encourages the ranting and raving and commercial collecting of all adgrunts worldwide.

Throughout the years, AdLand has had some positively awful colors. The very brave or colorblind may surf its previous incarnations via the waybackmachine.

Adland anno 1996 at: http://users.wineasy.se/adland
Adland anno 1998 at: http://blipp.com/adland
Adland anno 1999/2000 at: http://unltd.tm/adland
Adland anno summer of 2000: http://ad-rag.com
Adland 2006-2009 http://commercial-archive.com
adland 2009 -> http://adland.tv

We've been calling the site Adland since it's humble beginnings in 1996 and old habits die hard. Alas, someone beat us to buying the domain name way back when. Adland is easier to say than ad-dash-rag-dot-com and commercial-dash-archive-dot-com. We use Adland to refer to all the sections ( badland, the adforum, the commercial archive, The Claymore project 35 years of Super Bowl commercials etc) of the site. We now use the domain adland.tv, since early 2009, (and we have adland.eu a well kept secret we revealed in ten silly things you did not know about adland.)

Back in April of 2006, Adland switched the main domain for the site from ad-rag.com to commercial-archive.com due to the former being caught in various ad-blockers (ah the irony). You can read about all the nitty gritty details here.