I strongly believe it’s an oversimplification to say “banners good/bad” or “X banners is okay but Y is bad”. That misses the point of what it is that readers dislike. It’s not that they dislike banners. They dislike annoyance and obnoxiousness. There’s a big difference. It’s like asking, “Do people like food?” Most of them like chocolate but dislike liver. So with websites, I think it depends on the kind of banner setup you’re talking about.
If your banners are animated, that’s an annoyance. If you have *multiple* banners that are animated, on different parts of the screen, that’s a big annoyance.
As I’m typing this I’ve moved the window partially off the screen so I don’t have to see all those animated emoticons while I’m trying to THINK while writing my reply. Unfortunately that means I’m either stuck with the emoticons *under* this text box or the animated banner at the top of the window. They’re coming at me from all sides, and there’s nothing I can do. When I have to pause to think about how I want to phrase something, I have to look away at the screen so I’m not distracted by the animation. I’m a new member here, and there’s no question that I’ll spend less time with these forums than I would normally — and definitely less time writing replies because of the emoticon assault.
Anyway, the point is, once your banners are static instead of animated, you can have a whole lot more. On Wizard of Odds we used to have three banners in the sidebar, and then the sidebar was empty for the rest of the page. On pages with long articles that could mean that only 2% of the space was the three banners at the top and the remaining 98% was empty. Then I polled our readers, asking them which they preferred:
1. Keep it the way it was, with only three animated banners, or
2. Have a gazillion ads all the way down the sidebar throughout the whole page, except that none of them would be animated.
Guess which they picked? #2, overwhelmingly. 80% of them were fine with our *exploding* the number of ads we showed as long as they weren’t animated.
So I removed all the animation, and not only were visitors happier, I found that clickthrough didn’t suffer. Apparently when people aren’t being blinked at they’re more likely to stay on the site longer, more likely to return, and to have a friendlier attitude towards the advertisers — and maybe to trust the advertisers more.
Animated ads are something that are forced onto visitors, and nobody likes being steered towards something. It’s natural that when someone’s trying to steer you towards something, you resist. Any good salesperson will tell you that the secret of selling is not to go after the customer, it’s to get the customer to come to you. Easier said than done, maybe, but my feeling is that animation is so strong a push that it meets with a lot of resistance.
Even were this not the case, we were prepared to take a loss in advertising sales from decreased clickthrough if it meant making our visitors happier, because we focus on serving them, and figure that ultimately what’s good for our visitors is good for us. Thankfully we didn’t take a hit. In fact our ad sales have about tripled since we removed the animation.
Okay, so that covers the annoyance factor. The second factor related to banners is obnoxiousness. That’s when there is so much advertising on a page that it gets in the way of the content. One way to combat this is to put the ads on the perimeter of the page. That way the content will be unobstructed. If you do have some advertising in the middle of the page, just be very, very restrained about how much you have.
Realize also that there are different ways of using the same space. For example, if you have a 125×600 space where you could put ads, you could either put one 120×600 banner there, or four smaller 125×125 banners. What’s the difference? Well, for starters, when you give people too many options they might feel overwhelmed and not click *any* of the options. So in many cases I think a 120×600 banner will outperform four 125×125 banners. It will *definitely* keep the page less cluttered, too.
So in summary:
1. I don’t think you’ll turn off your visitors just because you add banners.
2. If you add animated banners, put them in the middle of the page, and put more than a couple on the page, then yeah, I don’t think they’d like that.
3. If your banners are non-animated then you can put a whole lot of them around the edges of the page.
4. A few big ads is probably better than a bunch of smaller ads.
This is just all my opinion, but it’s worked well for us. Hope this helps.