I dont see more than 1 graphic banner in 3 hours on my site, just a plain text banner with grey background, erghhh.. looks not interesting at all, is this the way COOP members wants to attract the visitors?? Are they too lazy to just create a static banner in photoshop??
Most people prefer showing links than banners, so why bother setting it up if only 0.5% of the webmasters are going to show it?
We use a banner! It's not the most exciting thing in the world... but it works.. However plain text is preferred by the search engines so that's what we put most of our weight into. =)
From my experience and from what I've read... Text link ads consistantly out perform banners. Both in the rate of click throughs and in the preferance/effect of SEs ( due to the ability to recognize "text link" keywords ). I could be mistaken and would love to hear some opinions. By the way Aaron Nimocks I think that banner would actually make me click... Sometimes less is more.... Ingenious!
Hmm... well I got off my lazy ass and put a image banner on the co-op for fun... put around 5k of weight on it for a couple days. My results... not much impressions (based off my server logs since the images are hosted on my server) compared to text links of the same age/weight. I realize that it's not a scientific test since pointing equal weight doesn't mean equal impressions (depends on what page/site happens to pull from dp)... anyhows, even though it's only been a couple days, it's back to text links I go. If somebody else has a different experience with running image ads on the co-op, let me know.