What is banner blindness?
Banner blindness is a particular phenomenon in online advertising where users ignore advertising banners on a page. Researchers measure banner blindness to understand whether certain types of banner ads on websites are effective or not.
Modern research has shown that the majority of internet surfers have some sort of banner blindness in many ways. Repetitive studies show that people are much more likely to focus on the core text and headings of the website than on banner ads at the top or on the page. Banner blindness started early in the life of the internet when more and more people learned that banner ads were often of little value on the website. It's also easy to ignore these ads once you've been conditioned to do so because they're usually on the periphery of the page.
Some studies show that up to 86 percent of readers don't even focus on banner ads. To combat banner blindness, advertisers have used creative tricks to make banner ads look like computer system messages. This increases the effectiveness of advertising banners but is still considered to be quite out of date and is relatively ineffective in online advertising.