| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
As a matter of fact, the banner advertisement has been extensively criticized since its birth. A major criticism has been users’ obvious ignorance of banner ads (Benway & Lane, 1998; Nielsen, 1997). Early studies of banner advertisements reported that Web users missed the existence of banner ads during their goal-oriented behaviors (Benway, 1999; Nielsen, 1997). Based on this observation, Benway (1999) coined the term banner blindness to describe the phenomenon that Web users ignore banner-shaped items that were clearly distinguished from other items on a Web page. Their conclusion is that banner ads, even with distinctive design features (animation, color, sound, etc.) hardly attract users’ attention due to Web users’ goal-directed behaviors.
Another common criticism has been closely related to the issue of how the performance of banner advertising should be measured. It has been measured directly using click-through rates (the average number of click-throughs per thousand ad impressions) or indirectly using impressions (the number of times the ad is displayed). Although a majority of advertisers consider the click-through-rates to be a more accountable way of measuring the performance of online advertising than the impression measure, click-through-rates have fallen to less than 0.5% since 2000 (DoubleClick, 2004b). Thus, if advertisers or Web publishers estimate the effectiveness of banner ads on the basis of click-through-rates, they should be skeptical about the use of banner ads as a reliable advertising tool.
Despite the early criticisms, in 2005, banner ads were still prevalent on the Internet. Not only are they persistent on the Web, but some types of banner ads have become increasingly popular in recent years. From 2003 to 2004, the use of the leaderboard, a 728 × 90 pixel ad often appearing at the top of pages, grew 384%, and the use of the wide skyscrapers (160 × 600 pixel ad) and the large rectangle (300 × 250 pixel) ad has nearly doubled (DoubleClick, 2004a).