Flash Banners

I like the way Flash banners look (as opposed to animated gifs), but I haven’t used a flash banner on any of my sites yet. Sites with Flash sprinkled here and there tend to be more attractive, in my opinion.

One downside to Flash, is that there is more code required to get a flash banner on your site, compared to a regular animated gif. I try to keep my code to a minimum, to ensure that the pages load quickly even on a dialup connection. Of course, the load time mainly depends on the flash file itself; it depends on how complex and how large the banner is.

Most of my content pages run between 5k and 15k in size, which is good for people on dialup. But these days, more and more people are switching to broadband, so it isn’t *too* much of an issue to add a 50k flash file.

I’d be interested to hear some demographic information from the sportsbetting programs. We can be pretty sure that most of the sports bettors are men. But do you know what type of internet connection these guys have? If 90% of them have broadband, then I would have no problem using flash banners on my site. But if only 50% of them have broadband, I’d have to consider it more carefully, because I don’t want the dialup people to be turned off by a potentially slow load time.