I just blogged about this but thought I would come here and share it. AdSense Blindness - Text Ads Catch Banner Blindness Syndrome When the proliference of Adsense type copy cats started to multiply, I wondered how long it would take consumers to start developing "text ad blindness". I just read an article complete with an eye tracking heat map, over at the Blog Herald which points to the The MIT Advertising Lab’s Blog about an upcoming study being released by Jakob Nielsen. This info will probably have an impact on how blogs are monetized in the future and is something affiliate marketers should be aware of. The bottom line being that text link ads within copy still seem to convert well, but banks of text links in the right column of the page - that look similar to Adsense, may not get click-through rates as well as they once did. Read the rest and see the eye tracking study over at The Blog Herald http://www.blogherald.com/2006/03/27/3445/ I see a ton of topics and questions right here in the forum that relate to this thread. What do you think?
They might have a point here. For example, I don't even see the ads anymore on gmail. However, I still think a lot of it has to do with how it is placed in the website.
12 years online, I ignore almost every possible ad format that exists But the heat mapped image on the linked article has another problem, which is the huge image on the right column, on top of the ads. It's so huge that probably, when the user loads the page, it occupies every space above the fold. Visitors, upon loading the page, will "record" that the right sidebar is decoration. They will focus (and read) the central column. So when they scroll down, they will keep their eyes focused there. I don't think they are ignoring the ads per-se, but instead the mental map formed to aid on navigation that users do stablished the right side bar as a "place to ignore". If that's the only website analysed, or the studied websites have similar layouts, then the conclusions are wrong. Edited: If the conclusion is "text ads blindness, it will happen"
i am using gmail from quite some time but havent noticed till recently and i got kind of surprised to see them there. This can really put bloggers in trouble.
Yet, strangly enough, I have experimented a little with a blog. When I put the ads after the texts instead of on the rightsite, upper right to be precise, I get less clicks. I think it's all very relative and site dependend.