Banner Ads – Are They Dead ?
Back in 1999 to about 2002, banner ads or graphical ads typically in the size of 60by468 took over from text ads as more companies and their designers started using them.
Banner ads fall out of use
Then from about 2002, onward as banners became hugely prevalent, the prevailing theory borne out by many screen heat maps showed that users were being banner ads ‘ed to death.
The truth was that there were just too many banner ads and users were learning to easily not look at them. Well, my own experience has been that experienced users learned to not look at them. While in a library last year, working with some older people and listening to them as they tried to work their way through various screens while doing certain tasks; it became obvious to me that they were not not seeing the banners. In truth, the banners were hugely distracting to them, and under their breath they were reading the banners and trying to figure out what to look at and what to not click on.
This turned out to be quite the educational experience for me, as I was really quite certain prior to this experience that most people simply ignored banners ads.
In the meantime, quite a few marketing teams were slowly moving away from banner display ads and trying a number of other alternatives many of them using glitzy flash ads and other media rich means. Banner use particularly in traffic rich areas such as Google adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing took a bit of a fall off.
Then in 2009, came the turn. Apparently, when too many people start doing a thing and it becomes slightly overused, after a while many of those same banner advertisers stop using the method and suddenly, quite invisibly, I might add, the method becomes viable again.
While looking, and simultaneously testing the new methods I came across, I stumbled upon some stuff that nobody uses for Google AdWords. The stuff that allows me to quietly operate under cover, cleaning up like mad on 1 cent clicks while the rest of the competition dog fights to pay 50 times more for the same visitor…
That secret sauce proved to be Banner Ads, ha ha.
Banner ads proved again and again in 2010
Then about 2 months ago Alex Goad came out with a report on how certain internet marketers were cleaning up ( making a lot of money ) with banner ads on google that they were paying mere cents for.
Further to that the Epic Traffic people confirmed that 6-8 cent clicks were still available in the content network ( now called the display network ) inside Google, and again the loophole was by using banner ads.
Again, repeated in a video by Amin Shah, given to a large audience in early 2010, it was yet again repeated that banner ads were rocking simply because they were cheap and could be purchased on cpm or cpc deals.
What really is the truth then about banner advertisement or banner ads?


