19 May 2008 Comments
In 1998 researchers Jan Benway and David Lane coined the phrase “banner blindness” for the newly observed phenomenon that web users tended to ignore the colourful, animated banner adverts that had previously been thought to be more likely to be seen.
Over a relatively short period of time, web users had discovered that ad banners tended not to contain information of much value to them – and learned to ignore them and focus their attention on text areas and hyperlinks which were much more likely to contain useful content. Hence “banner blindness” – web users have essentially trained themselves to ignore banner ads (or perhaps it could be argued that a proliferation of useless banner ads have done the training).
And the same thing happens, albeit more slowly, in the arena of real world sales.
