Banner blindness

Banner blindness is the phenomenon where the visitors on the website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner ads. Benway and Lane conducted a study on website usability. What they found was that any information provided through any ad banner was being over looked by users and people were altogether overlooking banners no matter where they were placed on the screen. What was even more surprising was they found that the traditional practice of making banners large, colourful and flashy had little effect on the blindness. Although the first ever banner had a click-through rate of 44% current banner ads have a miserable click-through rate of 0.1%.

Why does this exist? Well it was found that when users scan a webpage they normally read only the information that is relevant for them and ignore everything they do not need. An eye tracking study by Nielsen revealed that users would mostly navigate a webpage in an 'f' shapeed pattern starting on the content on the top of the page. Today as users are bombarded with ads on every site they have learned to focus on just the info permitted to them.