60 More Niche Encyclopedias That Should Exist
Two weeks ago I wrote 36 niche encyclopedia ideas. Yesterday I published the field guide to 23 reference sites that already exist. This one is the missing third piece: 60 more niche encyclopedias, grouped by domain, that nobody has built properly yet.
Same rules as before. One obsessive founder, one exhaustive catalog, decades of compounding SEO. Except this time I picked domains where the "should exist" gap is especially loud: marketing swipe files, software history, internet culture, startup graveyards, and design. Each section has 12 ideas. Each idea is a real site that could be built this weekend by the right person.
Part 1: Marketing (12 ideas)
Marketing is the single most document-hungry discipline on earth. Every copywriter, every growth hire, every founder googles "good landing page examples" at least twice a week. And yet most of what exists is either paywalled (Swiped.co), a random Pinterest board, or one blog post from 2017. The gap here is enormous.
1. The Direct Mail Letters Hall of Fame
Every famous direct response letter ever mailed. Wall Street Journal "Two Young Men", the Dollar Shave Club origin pitch, Gary Halbert's dollar-bill letter, Eugene Schwartz's book ads. Each entry: the scan, the transcript, the mailer, the control it beat, the results, and the deeper breakdown. The copywriting community will eat this alive. One site, one obsessive curator, infinite backlinks from copywriting courses.
2. The Infomercial Encyclopedia
Every infomercial that ever aired, cataloged. ShamWow, Snuggie, George Foreman Grill, Ginsu knives, OxiClean, Ronco. For each: the year, the host, the company, total units moved, the call-to-action structure, the pattern interrupts. This is where modern DTC copy was actually invented. Nobody has indexed it properly.
3. Every Super Bowl Ad, Ever
Not "top 10" listicles. The full catalog. Every ad since 1967 with price paid, agency, creative director, follow-up sales numbers, pop culture impact. Sortable by year, brand, agency, celebrity appearance. iSpot does this for the recent stuff but the pre-2010 archive is genuinely scattered.
4. The Print Ad Archive by Era
Ogilvy era, Bernbach era, Wieden era. Every magazine and newspaper ad that mattered, scanned, tagged, with the brief, the insight, the result. Some exist in dusty books (Communication Arts, The One Show annuals) but no living, searchable, linkable site.
5. Failed Rebrand Encyclopedia
Gap's 2010 logo disaster. Tropicana's 2009 packaging redesign. Pepsi's smile. Animal Planet. Mastercard. Every rebrand that was immediately reverted, with the before, the after, the agency, the cost, the stock price reaction, and the eventual rollback. Brand strategists will cite this weekly.
6. Tagline Origin Stories
Where "Just Do It" actually came from (spoiler: a murderer's last words). "Think Different." "Got Milk?" "Because You're Worth It." For each: the copywriter, the brief, the pitch meeting, the alternates that lost, the year it was retired. Pure linkbait for marketing blogs.
7. Guerrilla Marketing Stunts Catalog
Red Bull Stratos. The IHOb name change. Burger King's Whopper Detour. Dove Real Beauty Sketches. Every stunt that went viral, with the agency, the budget, the media impressions, the actual sales lift. Marketers google "best guerrilla campaigns" constantly and keep landing on the same five HubSpot listicles.
8. The Jingle Encyclopedia
Every advertising jingle, with composer, year, brand, and audio clip. "Give me a break" (Kit Kat), "I'd like to buy the world a Coke", "By Mennen", "Oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener". Boomers will share this on Facebook and Gen Z will discover it through TikTok. Built-in distribution.
9. Brand Mascot History
Every mascot: Tony the Tiger, Geico Gecko, Mr. Peanut, the Energizer Bunny, the Aflac Duck. For each: creator, year introduced, voice actors, redesigns over time, retirements, and the modern "killed off" storylines (RIP Mr. Peanut, 2020). A goldmine for ad students and pop culture writers.
10. Billboards That Mattered
Outdoor advertising is almost completely undocumented online. The Absolut Vodka bottle-shaped billboards. Apple's Think Different portraits. The Economist's "I never read The Economist. Management trainee, age 42." Georeferenced, sortable by medium (vinyl, paint, digital), with media cost.
11. Pop-Up Store Encyclopedia
Every brand activation and pop-up that became a marketing case study. Museum of Ice Cream. Supreme drops. Refinery29's 29Rooms. Kanye's Donda listening party. With dates, locations, foot traffic, press impressions, and the agency behind it. Experiential marketers have nowhere to reference this.
12. Product Placement in Films Database
Every confirmed product placement with the fee paid. Reese's Pieces in E.T. (free, became legendary). BMW Z3 in GoldenEye (the reason the brand survived the 90s). Apple in every movie since 2005. Sortable by film, brand, year, and known fee. Brand Channel had this once. It rotted. Someone needs to rebuild it.
Part 2: Software History (12 ideas)
Software history is in worse shape than almost any field. Wikipedia covers the famous stuff (Unix, Netscape) but the weird, dead, beautiful corners are either on dying GeoCities mirrors or in one PDF from a retirement symposium. Programmers are a huge, nostalgic, link-happy audience.
13. Dead Programming Languages Encyclopedia
SNOBOL, Algol 68, BCPL, PL/I, RPG, Forth dialects, Oberon, Self, Mesa, ABC. For each: creator, year, the ideas it pioneered, the modern language that stole them, the last known compiler, sample code. The HOPL conference papers are the closest thing and they are genuinely unreadable to a normal programmer.
14. Abandoned Operating Systems Catalog
BeOS, OS/2, NeXTSTEP, AmigaOS, RISC OS, Plan 9, Inferno, TempleOS, Haiku. For each: the philosophy, the interface screenshots, the reason it died, the community that still keeps it alive. There are fragments on OSNews and random Reddit posts. Nothing comprehensive.
15. The Text Editor Family Tree
Every editor, in a single lineage tree. TECO to Emacs to XEmacs to Atom to VS Code. Vi to Vim to Neovim to Helix. BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime. With founders, forks, dead branches, license drama, and the legendary fights. Programmers will obsess over this like cars or watches.
16. Build Systems History
Make (1976), Imake, autoconf, automake, SCons, Ant, Maven, Gradle, Bazel, Pants, Buck, Nix, Ninja. For each: the year, the author, the problem it solved, the new suffering it introduced. Every senior engineer has opinions about this. Nobody has ever written the definitive reference.
17. Unix Utility Origin Encyclopedia
Who wrote `grep`? Ken Thompson, in one night, in response to Doug McIlroy asking for a way to search email. Same thing for `awk`, `sed`, `yacc`, `cut`, `sort`, `diff`, `uniq`. Each entry: the author, the year, the original commit or paper, the one-liner philosophy. Linking from every shell blog on earth, guaranteed.
18. Forgotten File Formats Archive
Every dead binary format with hex dumps, parser notes, and example files. .DBF, .WK1, .MDB, .WPD, .PCX, .SIT, .HQX, RealMedia, RealAudio, ShockWave. Old-format nerds already keep pockets of this (archiveteam, libopenraw, file-formats.fandom) but a polished, searchable version would become the reference instantly.
19. Every Borland Turbo Product, Ever
Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++, Turbo Prolog, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Debugger, Turbo Vision, Delphi, JBuilder. Each with box art, version history, the Philippe Kahn origin story, the Anders Hejlsberg departure, the eventual slow death. Borland was the most romantic company in software and almost nobody under 40 knows why.
20. Discontinued Adobe Products
Flash, Fireworks, GoLive, PageMaker, FreeHand (acquired then killed), Director, Authorware, Muse, Edge Animate, ColdFusion Builder, Device Central, Encore. Each with launch year, kill year, what replaced it, and who is still salty on Twitter. Flash alone deserves a museum.
21. The Dead JavaScript Framework Museum
Dojo, Mootools, Prototype, YUI, Script.aculo.us, Backbone, Ember (still alive, technically), Knockout, Meteor, AngularJS (the real one), Aurelia, Polymer, Mithril, Riot. Timeline of rise and fall, who built them, which companies bet wrong, and the one big idea each one contributed to React. Every JS dev will spend an hour reading this.
22. Historical Compiler Projects
GCC versus LLVM is the famous fight. But what about Watcom C, Intel C++, Open64, Portable C Compiler, Plan 9's 8c/6c/5c, Comeau, Zortech, Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Each with benchmarks, lineage, notable users (CodeWarrior was the official SDK for the GameCube). Retro-game developers and compiler engineers will cite this forever.
23. The Shareware Archive Museum
Every shareware title, cataloged, with original zip files and boot instructions. Apogee's Commander Keen. id Software's early Wolfenstein. Tucows. ZDNet downloads. The "please register this software for $25" nag screens. Abandonware sites have pieces of this but no proper encyclopedia with founder stories and revenue numbers.
24. Pre-Git Version Control Systems
RCS, CVS, Subversion, Perforce, BitKeeper (the one that caused Git to be born), ClearCase, Visual SourceSafe (the one that destroyed a generation of enterprises), Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, Monotone. Each with design philosophy, user count at peak, the specific bug or feature that killed it. Perfect nerd-bait.
Part 3: Internet Culture and Web History (12 ideas)
The early internet is dying in real time. Every year, another batch of GeoCities mirrors, angelfire pages, and forum archives goes offline permanently. This is the most urgent preservation domain on this list.
25. The GeoCities Neighborhood Archive
Not just "GeoCities is dead" nostalgia. A proper, navigable reconstruction of each neighborhood (Area51, Heartland, Tokyo, SiliconValley) with every preserved page, sortable by year, theme, and visit count. Archive Team saved most of it. Nobody has made it actually browsable.
26. Dead Social Networks Catalog
Friendster, Orkut, MySpace (technically alive but dead in spirit), Bebo, Google+, Path, Ello, Peach, Vero, Clubhouse (sort of). Each with founding team, peak MAU, exit or shutdown reason, the one thing they got right, the one thing that killed them. The MySpace Tom story alone justifies the entry.
27. The Forgotten BBS Encyclopedia
Every dial-up bulletin board from the 80s and 90s. The WELL, FidoNet, Monochrome, Quantum Link (which became AOL). Their sysops, their door games, their file areas, the legendary flame wars. There's a small, aging community that still remembers this. They need a home before they die.
28. Early Flash Game Archive
Newgrounds, Kongregate, AddictingGames, Miniclip. Every Flash game with developer, upload date, play count, and the emulated browser version. Flashpoint preserves the files. Nobody has built the encyclopedic metadata layer on top. Meatboy, Alien Hominid, Stick RPG, Line Rider. There is a massive nostalgic audience.
29. Pre-Reddit Forums Encyclopedia
Something Awful, 4chan's early days, Fark, Digg, Slashdot, Metafilter, Plastic, Kuro5hin, TotalFark, PortalOfEvil. For each: founding date, peak traffic, dominant in-jokes, the moderator drama, the migration to Reddit. This is the lost literary history of the internet.
30. Meme Origin Encyclopedia (First Appearance Edition)
Know Your Meme exists but it's been hit hard by recent Google updates and the catalog has holes. A stricter version: for each meme, the exact first documented post, date, platform, and account. "Distracted Boyfriend" traces back to a specific stock photo by Antonio Guillem. "Doge" is a specific Shiba Inu named Kabosu who died in 2024. Rigor matters.
31. Dead MMORPG Worlds
Every shuttered MMO: City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, Asheron's Call, The Matrix Online, APB, Earth & Beyond, Auto Assault, Glitch. For each: launch date, shutdown date, peak subscribers, the grief post threads, the community-run rogue servers that kept it alive. Glitch alone has a beautiful story.
32. Early Emoji and Emoticon History
Scott Fahlman's 1982 :-). Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 i-mode emoji set. The 2010 Unicode adoption fight. Every platform's interpretation of the poop emoji. Regional variants. Banned emoji. Apple's secret emoji redesigns. The pistol-to-water-gun change. This is a genuinely important piece of communication history with zero comprehensive reference.
33. Banned Subreddits and Forums Archive
Every community that got banned from a major platform, with the mod team, the rule that killed it, the migration destination, and archived sample posts where legally possible. Not for shock value: for documentation. The story of how platforms moderated themselves into their current shape is important history.
34. The Discontinued Google Products Graveyard
Killedbygoogle.com exists and is great but it's just a list. Needs the full version: launch video, exec sponsor, peak users, the internal memo that killed it, where the team went after. Google Reader, Wave, Buzz, Inbox, Stadia, Allo, Duo, Hangouts (the original), Currents, Jamboard, OnHub, Picasa. There is endless content here.
35. Early Webcam Websites Museum
The Trojan Room coffee pot (1991). JenniCam. The Amsterdam live webcam. Every "first X webcam" site with year, host, and archived frames where preserved. Webcams are the forgotten UX of the early internet and almost nobody has written about them properly.
36. Internet Hoaxes and Viral Scams Catalog
Balloon Boy. The Blair Witch viral campaign. #Cutforbieber. Bonsai Kitten. Every elaborate online hoax with the originator, the spread pattern, the debunking, and the cultural impact. Snopes does this one article at a time. A structured, searchable encyclopedia would be very different.
Part 4: Startup and Business History (12 ideas)
Crunchbase has the data but no soul. TechCrunch has the obituaries but no structure. There is a massive gap for a site that documents business failure with the same care that Wikipedia gives to WWII battles.
37. The Failed YC Startups Database
Y Combinator has funded over 5,000 companies. Most are dead. For each dead one: batch, founders, one-liner, amount raised, shutdown date, post-mortem (if public), where the founders went next. YC publishes the live ones. Nobody tracks the dead ones.
38. The Acqui-Hire Encyclopedia
Every acqui-hire with the price, the shutdown timeline, and what happened to the original product. Instagram did not acqui-hire. Mailbox did (Dropbox, killed). Sparrow did (Google, killed). Summly (Yahoo, Nick D'Aloisio). The acqui-hire is the quiet killer of a generation of good products. Document it.
39. Dot-Com Bust Casualties Catalog
Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, Kozmo, Boo.com, Flooz, Beenz, Pixelon, Go.com, theGlobe.com. Each with total raised, peak valuation, shutdown date, the specific mistake (almost always: spent Super Bowl ad money on a business with no unit economics). The original dot-com obituary sites are all 404 now. This is urgent preservation.
40. Dead Unicorns Encyclopedia
Theranos, WeWork (not dead but diminished), Quibi, Fab.com, Jawbone, Juicero, Color, Munchery, Homejoy, Zirtual, Powa, Beepi. Each with funding history, the specific implosion, founder subsequent trajectory. Unicorn deaths teach more than unicorn births. The existing coverage is scattered across a hundred TechCrunch and Forbes articles.
41. Startup Pivots That Worked Database
Every famous pivot with before and after. Slack was an MMO (Tiny Speck's Glitch). Instagram was Burbn (a Foursquare clone). Twitter was Odeo (a podcasting tool). YouTube was a dating site. Shopify was a snowboard shop. Pinterest was Tote. With month-by-month usage data where available and founder quotes from the period.
42. Bootstrap Success Stories Database
Every profitable, self-funded company with revenue, team size, founding year, and origin story. Basecamp, Mailchimp (pre-acquisition), ConvertKit, Balsamiq, Tarsnap, Pinboard, Fastmail, Linear (partially), DHH's various exits, Plenty of Fish (Markus Frind, one guy, $575M exit). IndieHackers started this mission but it's drifted. A rigorous encyclopedia is different.
43. Founder Firings Encyclopedia
Every founder who got fired from their own company. Steve Jobs (1985). Parker Conrad (Zenefits). Travis Kalanick. Dov Charney. Andrew Mason (Groupon). Noah Glass (Twitter). Each with the specific board meeting, the trigger, the severance, and the comeback (or lack thereof). There is no reference site for this and it's one of the most searched topics in tech.
44. Pre-IPO Flameouts Catalog
Companies that filed to go public and then didn't. WeWork's original S-1 (the Adam Neumann version). Endeavor's pulled 2019 IPO. SmileDirectClub post-IPO collapse. SolarCity's near-miss. Each with the S-1, the specific red flag that killed it, and the eventual outcome. This is a case study goldmine.
45. Dead Marketplaces Encyclopedia
Marketplaces die in specific, predictable ways. Zaarly, Homejoy, Exec, TaskRabbit (pre-IKEA, original model), Fab, LivingSocial, Groupon Goods, eBay Express, Bonanzle, Shopkick. For each: the category, the chicken-and-egg mistake, the CAC/LTV collapse. Marketplace founders desperately need this reference.
46. Merger Failures Database
Every tech merger that destroyed value. AOL-Time Warner. HP-Autonomy. Microsoft-Nokia. eBay-Skype (before the comeback). Daimler-Chrysler. Quaker-Snapple. Each with the deal price, the write-down, the specific integration failure. Business schools teach these but no public, linkable, sortable catalog exists.
47. Bankruptcy Court Tech Auction Archive
Every Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 where tech assets were sold at auction. What domains, trademarks, and patents sold for. MySpace. Palm. Friendster. RIM/BlackBerry's eventual breakup. WeWork's asset sales. Each with the bankruptcy filing docs, the buyer, the price, the subsequent use. Weirdly fascinating, genuinely useful for IP lawyers and domain speculators.
48. The "Could Have Been" Near-Acquisitions
Yahoo almost bought Google ($1B, 1998, turned it down). Blockbuster almost bought Netflix ($50M, 2000, laughed them out of the room). Excite almost bought Google (they turned it down). Facebook almost bought Snapchat ($3B). Each with the documented offer, the rejection, and the counterfactual value today. There are dozens of these. Nobody has cataloged them.
Part 5: Design and Aesthetics (12 ideas)
Design history has books (lots of them) but the web reference layer is thin and unmonetized. Designers are obsessive catalogers, share a lot, and have clients willing to pay for deep craft references.
49. Logo Evolution Encyclopedia
Every major brand's logo history with year, designer, and the specific brief that produced each change. Apple (from the 1976 Newton drawing to today). Pepsi. Coca-Cola. Shell. IBM. Google. With the internal brand guidelines where leaked. Logopedia exists on Fandom and is the closest thing, but a polished, non-wiki version would crush it.
50. Pantone Color Origin Stories
Every Pantone swatch with the named reference. "Tiffany Blue" (PMS 1837, Tiffany's founding year). UPS Brown (PMS 476C). Coca-Cola Red. International Klein Blue. Tardis Blue. The annual "Color of the Year" history since 2000. Designers will bookmark this and cite it in every deck.
51. Typeface History Database
Every famous typeface with designer, foundry, year, and the specific commission or problem it was designed for. Helvetica (Max Miedinger, Haas, 1957, Swiss corporate modernism). Gotham (Hoefler, 2000, originally for GQ). Comic Sans (Vincent Connare, 1994, originally for Microsoft Bob). Papyrus (Chris Costello, 1982). Fonts In Use is close but limited. This would be the typographic Discogs.
52. Dead Magazine Layouts Archive
Every notable magazine redesign, scanned spread by spread. Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone. David Carson at Ray Gun. Neville Brody at The Face. Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar. Print magazine design is a dying art with a thousand obsessive followers and no central reference.
53. Discontinued Fonts Encyclopedia
Every font that was pulled, withdrawn, or orphaned when a foundry died. The House Industries discontinued sets. Monotype pulls. Fonts that were removed from Google Fonts. Typefaces lost when a designer died intestate. Typography lawyers, brand designers, and archivists all need this.
54. UI History Museum
Screenshots of every OS, every browser, every major app, for every year. System 1 (1984) through Sequoia (2024). Windows 1.0 through 11. Every Mac OS menu bar icon set. Every Photoshop toolbar. GUIdebook has a fragment of this but it's decaying. A modern version, community-contributed, with emulators linked, would explode.
55. Package Design History
Every famous product package and the designer behind it. The Coca-Cola bottle (Earl R. Dean, 1915). The Toblerone prism. Heinz ketchup. Absolut. Orangina. Marlboro. Tiffany box. Each with the brief, the original sketches if available, and the redesign history. Grocery stores are a museum nobody has indexed.
56. Swiss Design Movement Catalog
Every Swiss style poster, book, and brand system from 1950-1980. Josef Müller-Brockmann's concerts posters. Armin Hofmann. Emil Ruder. Karl Gerstner. With dates, clients, and the grid system annotated. Design students google this stuff constantly and get Pinterest boards with zero citations.
57. Cereal Box Art Archive
Every cereal box ever designed. Kellogg's. General Mills. Post. Quaker. With year, illustrator, mascot version, and limited edition promotional variants. There is a surprisingly deep collector community here and the material is pure Americana. Perfect for Instagram reposts and nostalgia marketing.
58. Arcade Cabinet Art Encyclopedia
Every arcade cabinet with side art, marquee, control panel layout, and the illustrator. Street Fighter II. Donkey Kong. Tron. Tempest. Most of this art was unattributed or credited to the game but the cabinet artists are a specific, identifiable group. Killer Instinct's Sandy Collora, for example. A real reference site would honor them.
59. Movie Poster History Database
Every major film with every territorial poster version, sorted by country, illustrator, and year. The Drew Struzan era (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future). The Saul Bass title card era. Polish film poster school. Russian avant-garde cinema posters. IMDB has some but posters are a specialty and deserve their own encyclopedia.
60. Album Cover Evolution Archive
Every famous album cover with photographer, designer, art director, year, and the backstory. The Dark Side of the Moon (Storm Thorgerson, Hipgnosis, 1973). Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (the CP 1919 pulsar). Sgt. Pepper. Abbey Road. Nevermind. Each with outtakes where available. Discogs has the data, nobody has the story layer.
How to pick one
If you read the field guide, the patterns are clear. The sites that survived did four things:
- One obsessed founder. No committees. No co-founders who don't care. The site reflects one brain's specific taste.
- A niche where the data is alive. Something new gets added every month. Dead ideas lists decay; living catalogs compound.
- A community moat. Google is going to keep beating you up. You need direct traffic from newsletters, RSS, forums, or a loyal audience who types the URL.
- Patience. Most of these sites took 10 years to matter. OEIS is 60. Etymonline is 24. Technovelgy is 22. Start one now and be the obsessive person who is still here in 2036.
Of the 60 above, if I had to pick three I'd bet on most, my picks are:
- The Text Editor Family Tree (#15). Developers obsess over their tools. This gets shared in every Hacker News thread for the next 20 years.
- Failed Rebrand Encyclopedia (#5). Tiny audience (brand strategists) with high willingness to pay and constant news cycles refreshing the content.
- Dead Marketplaces Encyclopedia (#45). Every VC pitch deck cites these. Founders want to know what killed the last attempt in their category. Charges for detailed case studies, free for the basic catalog.
Pick the one that makes you say "wait nobody has done this?" out loud. That's the signal.