I expect this article to be a little controversial with advertisers and people who depend upon banners. I also expect that anyone else will applaud or at least be reasonably supportive of what I have to say.
So I'll just jump right into the fire and forget the frying pan this time. Banner ads are obnoxious, not effective and a tremendous waste of money and internet bandwidth. Whew. Do I duck?
I know that when I first got on the internet I thought they were annoying but soon accepted them as just part of the landscape, just as I would accept trash that people leave around campgrounds. There didn't seem to be anything that I could do about it ... so I just ignored them. Every once in a while I did click on a banner, at the very beginning of my surfing career, but it soon grew tiresome and unproductive. It's probably been over year since I've clicked on a single banner ad.
When I began I used a free host, like most everyone else that I knew. I had some false information that paid hosts were expensive and somehow not nice to be with. Thus, I was stuck with the insipid banner ad, first as a pop up and later on the top of my web site. Once I did find a paid host (and found out that they are actually very affordable and much nicer than the free hosts) I added my own banners, thinking that I could make a dollar or two. After all, the free host was doing it, why couldn't I?
After a few months it became obvious to me that my banner ads were not working (didn't make a dime) so I experimented. I tried rotating them, using text links, hypertext menus, and every other thing that I could think of. I even joined a bunch of banner exchanges. Nothing worked at all.
Now that I've removed most of the banners from my site long ago, I am much happier. When I run across that odd page in my site which still has a banner, I am thrilled to blast it into eternity.
My site is much cleaner, loads faster and looks better without any silly banner ads. I also feel better, as I no longer feel like I am doing something, somehow wrong.
You see, the issues about banner ads are bad enough: they increase load time, they look terrible, they cause visitors to leave a site never to return, and they even sometimes cause pages to fail to load at all (as I learned when one of the banner exchanges that I used was down). When you add to that the fact (I'll duck again, but this is a truth) that banner ads do not work. Period.
Let me rephrase that. If you are going to spend money advertising on the internet, you cannot find a worse place to spend it (except perhaps FFA listings) than on banner ads. You would be better off, and more entertained, to flush your dollar bills, one by one, down the toilet.
And that, in the words of Steve Austin, is all I've got to say about that.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.