Banner Blindness

In a sort of complementary story to Charlene Li’s report, I will point you towards Jakob Nielson’s latest eyetracking study that confirms that Banner Blindness is real

• People looking at websites do not look at ads, nor do they look at design elements that look like ads.
• However, they do look at paid placements on search results
• Making the ads look like content does get people to look at them

Nielson questions the ethics of the latter, but the lure of eyeballs may prove too strong for many. Newspapers and magazines still spearate ads from editorial, even if you can get fooled by paid articles which may only have subtle markings on them to differentiate them from the rest of the content. But eyeballs only get you so far; for real results, think about engaging your customers.