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Banner Ads – 15 Years Old
By Anna Johnson on November 3rd, 2009According to Silicon Alley Insider, October 27 marked the 15th birthday of the banner ad. On that date in 1994, HotWired.com first began displaying banner ads for Volvo, AT&T, MCI and Club Med among other firms.
The first year or so of the banner ad was also its ‘banner year’ with some of those early ads getting click-through rates as high 78 percent. CTRs on banner ads have gone downhill ever since and so too, according to Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, has the relevance of banner ads.
Carlson quotes figures from comScore that 85 percent of all clicks on banners derive from only 8 percent of Internet users – users who tend to be poorer and less educated than other Internet users.
The widespread low popularity and low CTRs of banner ads has certainly prompted online publishers and advertisers to consider using new display ad units. The humble banner ad, however, is still well and truly alive (just look around!).
Justifiable or not, a key reason why banner ads persist is that they meet universal and uniform standards. The
existence of standardized banner ad sizes makes it relatively easy and convenient for publishers to incorporate banner ads into their webpage layouts, and for advertisers to provide ads that meet the requirements of most publishers and online ad networks.
Consequently, any new ad units purporting to replace banner ads will need to meet widely accepted standards in order to achieve widespread adoption by advertisers and publishers. It can certainly be done – after all, that’s how banner ads came about – but it’s a challenge nonetheless.
