Banners

I've got to admit, this is a fairly under-developed page in that I've had very little experience with this using banners for advertising.

• I missed out completely on the pop-up advertising phase, essentially because I found them offensive
• marginally less so were those opt-in boxes that slide in and shudder, drawing your attention to them 
• a new "unstoppable" pop-up appeared in 2005 that looked crisp and modern but then seemed to disappear. My guess is that my Google toolbar or Mozilla blocks them now, too and I think the same goes for pop-unders as well

So, most of that obtrusive advertising is gone and we're left with good old banners. They died a death for a few years but they seem to have come back quite strongly:

1    on sites like eBay, where they tend to advertise non contextually (i.e. not specific to the page's text) with big "corporate" web identities like Monster.com.

2    I notice many webmasters using banner ads (or those rectangular ones) in a contextual sort of way, directing the site visitor to a relevant product (see the banner below), which I don't find offensive though, of course, the aesthetics of FLASH is a different matter altogether! 

There's no doubt that banners are back and with Google Adwords offering advertising with visuals and I believe that soon, contextual banner advertising will be big business.

Google also purchased ad network Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in April 2007, prompting this post from Business Week (about halfway down the page): 

"...The more interesting thing is the potential for the DoubleClick deal to revive the market for banner ads..."

The Street TV: Google & Doubleclick

With that multi-billion dollar deal in mind, I'm presently undertaking my own humble experiments, advertising with...

...who offer contextual advertising, and are, I believe, the best old-style banner exchange site on the web. I'm doing experiments with several different banners for each of several different Clickbank products which go:

banner Clickbank sales page

banner pre-sell landing page  Clickbank sales page  

banner re-written sales page  Clickbank order page

...Of course, that's involving rather a lot of testing and tracking, so the results will only be available in early 2008 but if you're interested in seeing their rates, they're: