Snowball.com

Beautifully engraved Specimen certificate from Snowball.com. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the Snowball company logo. Rick Boyce is shown as President.






Certificate Vignette



Snowball.com was the leading online network for Generation i and the companies that want to reach its population of Web-centric young adults. Headquartered in San Francisco, Snowball aggregated top Generation-i-produced Web sites and brought its active Net-centric audience to companies that offer products and services targeted to the demographic. The company was consistently ranked by Media Metrix as one of the largest consolidated properties on the Internet. Its primary networks include ChickClick.com, IGN.com, and PowerStudents.com. All sites include content developed by Snowball.com and its partners, as well as links to other related sites.

Snowball.com, changed its name to IGN Entertainment. IGN Entertainment, through its flagship network IGN.com, is the Internet's leading information and entertainment destination for teen and young adult gamers. IGN serves its audience by providing both free and subscription-based content and services. IGN's award winning content -- two Webby People's Voice Awards and two Wired Magazine's Readers Raves Awards -- attracts more than eight million unique visitors a month, including over 5.7 million registered users and more than 76,000 paying subscribers. IGN offers its business customers a full spectrum of integrated marketing solutions to reach this large web-centric audience. These products include fixed placement and impression-based advertising, sponsorships, permission marketing, custom publishing, e-commerce, direct e-mail marketing and content licensing.

---

About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.