Moving WebWord > Usability Perspecitve on Banner Ads

Usability Perspective on Banner Ads

by John S. Rhodes

I recently have read a lot about the use of banner ads. My short answer is that they don't work. They might be useful for branding and image campaigns but they are not usable and users don't like them at all. I recently posted this message to the WebDesign-L mailing list sponsored by Hesketh.com.

In relation to the "evil of banner ads", here are some things to chew on (I apologize in advance if these points have been made earlier). First, people ought to consider how usability folks have addressed the use of banners. Basically, several usability and marketing research reports indicate that people visually "skip" banners and that banners don't work. We scan web pages for information; we hunt for appropriate links and information in several typical locations (i.e., we know where to find what we want to find, if the site is well-formed). We have stereotypes about how pages are designed, and in fact, most well-traveled sites do follow similar patterns. <RANT>If you huff and puff and say that you want to use bold and brave designs, go ahead. We need people like you; you push the envelope. But, the vast majority of sites should be simple, straight forward, and (gasp!) follow the plain vanilla formula. Humans are creatures of habit.</RANT> We know where banners are located and therefore, we know how to skip over them since we aren't *looking* for ads. We are looking for information. Thus, there is "banner blindness". Don Norman (a usability big gun) does a great job explaining why he thinks users act in this way. If you care about banners and advertising, this is an important piece of reading.

Second, Jakob Nielsen (another usability big gun) has explained why advertising, as it stands, doesn't work on the web. The supply-push model of banner ads doesn't work from a user's point of view. The web is demand-pull. Think of it this way: when you go to a site you have made a decision to be there and you are hunting for information (or a good time). You demand information and you seek to pull it form the site. Banners simply get in the way of your information gathering experience. They slow your download, they are flashy and distracting (but not attention grabbing in a positive way), and they eat up valuable screen real estate. Users either hate them or don’t care about them; almost no one likes banner ads (unless they created them).

Banner ad spending by large companies continues to drop. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reports that web advertising by large companies declined from 68% in 1998 to 61% in 1999, and total spending on Web advertising for those companies that still advertise has fallen from $714,000 to $649,000. New, user-driven models of revenue generation need to be developed.

UPDATE (10-July-99): Here's some empirical evidence that banner ads don't work from Salon. By the way, I found out about the Salon article through Brigitte Eaton's weblog. I'll warn you -- she uses some language that you might deem innappropriate (but, perhaps it is the appropriate language level for her target audience). In any event, she has interesting things to say now and then.

Now, what should you do?

Subscribe to the WebWord.com Usability Newsletter

Read another article: Super Easy Usability Testing

Recommend this article to a friend

Visit the Moving WebWord index!