What's up with the tiny banner ads?

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The point of the tiny-banners experiment is to see how obtrusive they are, and how clever people can be about putting a very small space to good use. What do you think?

-- Jorn (jorn@mcs.com), November 22, 1999

Answers

Displaying 1 to 4 of the mini ads might work better than the whole gaggle. And perhaps on a largely text-only site like Robot Wisdom, text-only ads, set off by some special marker, might make sense.

-- Jason (jason@kottke.org), November 22, 1999.

1. I'm sure people can be creative with the space, but so far the ads don't attract me to click on them; they don't give me enough information to click away.

2. They're still obtrusive. They look terrible together. They're a mass of colors that don't work together on a page that avoids strong use of color. They table up nicely at 640 wide, but poorly at other widths. Worse, they're meta-animated at the same rate of "normal" banners - popping up as they load, they mimic movement and draw the eye to the top.

3. I think they still might work if they were tabled away to the right, all the same width and all in one column.

-- Arthur Alexander (abalone@zerodefect.net), November 22, 1999.


In their current arrangement, I agree that there are too many to be visually appealing. I'd cut it to showing four or so at a time OR... despite your dislike of tables... use a simple two-column table (which wouldn't take long to load) and stack the ads on top of each other next to your list of headlines.

Say, something like:

[table] [tr] [td align="left" valign="top"] (all your headlines) [/td] [td align="right" valign="top"] (all the ads, separated by [BR]s) [/td] [/tr] [/table]

I think most people's window widths could handle it.

-- Steve Bogart (bogart@nowthis.com), November 23, 1999.


I don't mind the ads myself, but then, I have the design sense of a rutabaga, as anyone who's been to my web site knows.

If you do keep up with this experiment, perhaps you should consider making a database available somehow (via an XML page?) to others who want to use the ads too. That way they don't have to track down & cut the HTML, and could potentially automate the process.

-- Mike Gunderloy (MikeG1@mcwtech.com), November 23, 1999.


If you must have ad banners (I'd prefer if you didn't, but its not my site of course) please consider making them text based instead of graphics based. I noticed that they have greatly slowed down an already slow loading page, at least on my connection. They are unattractive (that's me being polite) and ruin the look/layout of the rest of the page.

I'm disappointed. Its bad enough to be bombarded by ad banners everywhere else. I don't click on them anyway and I don't think they are effective. How about having a "recommended websites" list on a separate page linked to the main page?

-- Oxnard (astroman@hickory.net), November 23, 1999.



I agree with Arthur Alexander (November 22, 1999): "I think they still might work if they were tabled away to the right, all the same width and all in one column"

I use a slightly different technique on one of my homepages: come.to/huesken (or, directly:) http://www.euronet.nl/users/icu02300/trog.htm

It's in Dutch, but if you select an option on the right, ie. home, zoeken, nieuws etc., a frame on the right shows a table of banners with the same height and width. Clicking on them opens the link in the center frame.

-- peter.huesken (peter.huesken@icu.nl), November 24, 1999.


I wouldn't have suspected that your own ad pointed to huger.html, formerly linked via "more". I didn't figure it out until I peeked at the source to see where the link had gone to.

I'll admit that the filename "huger.html" is opaque to me, also. ;-)

I've had fun playing with the little banner. I use different image editing programs, depending on whether I'm at work or at home.

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

-- Anita Rowland (anitar@halcyon.com), December 04, 1999.


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