Banner ads hinder visual search and are forgotten.

Banner ads persist on the Internet in spite of evidence against their efficacy. Many ads include animation in an attempt to increase their attentional capture. An experiment was conducted to examine how various banner ads affect the visual search of news headlines on the Web, and whether participants could recall the ads they saw. The results both support and contradict the notion of "banner blindness," the idea that people ignore banner ads. Participants could not recall the ads that they saw, but those ads did distract the users and significantly increased search times. The most surprising result is that recall was especially bad for animated banners. This paper examines issues of attentional capture in an applied domain and provides guidance for web designers.