

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings - brlewis
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

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webwright
I'd be interested in hearing trends about text-ad blindness. I know I look at
and click adwords ads (and adsense ads) a LOT less than I did when they first
came available... Especially since Google sold out their ad relevancy and
allowed wildcard purchases or unrelated purchases (like ebay showing up on
virtually every search with a "find SearchQuery and More at Ebay!!1!!1!"

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brett
_The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look
at it_

For all his wacky buildup about the ethics of disclosing such a fact this was
a pretty sorry payoff. It is exactly what I would predict from the results of
such a study. For something to be insidious enough to consider not telling the
public about it I would expect it to at least be both born out by empirical
evidence AND counter-intuitive.

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dfranke
It seems like it ought to be easy to fool the user's unconscious processes
that determine fixation while still making clear at a conscious level what is
and is not an ad. For example, match the color scheme and typography of ads
with the rest of the site, but clearly label them as "sponsored links". While
it's possible that you might annoy users this way, it would be a real stretch
to call it unethical.

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aston
This information is pretty unsurprising. That said, I think Nielson is
discounting to some degree the effect of good typography/page layout in this
discussion.

Pages that are designed well will focus the attention of the audience on the
content being delivered. Note that the users also aren't looking at other
things that seem to be accessory, like the navigation panes. In the end,
though, that's just another argument to try to blend ads into the content area
of the site, ethical or not.

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blored
Wow, the most impressive part of the article is the eye heat map.

