3 ms·

Or phrased another way, why does a banner need to be anything more than an image, possibly an animated image? Everything else screams of abuse and unnecessary

• Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Simple: Because video ads are more effective, thus providing more sales for whatever's being advertised and more advertising income. Ad companies are trying to find the limit of annoyance vs effectiveness, and despite most people finding video ads and the like annoying, they're proven to be more effective than static ones.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    They reason they're annoying is because they distract from the content, which is the reason they're effective, they steal focus. The ad companies aren't trying to find the limit of annoyance vsc effectiveness, they're trying to maximise their profit. They don't care about annoyance, in fact annoyance can actually be positive for brand advertising.
• jefftk 8y ago
  > why does a banner need to be anything more than an image? Because of exactly situations like this! Say you're an advertiser and you make an image banner. You make a deal with an ad network to show your ad on some pages. Some site makes a deal with the same ad network to show ads on its pages. Your ad is on the publisher page, users are seeing it, everything is good. Now a scummy publisher signs up with this ad network, and sets the ads to display underneath something else. If the ads are just simple images and nothing more, there isn't a way for the advertiser or the ad network to tell that they're being scammed. (Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads declarative so they don't get to do this sort of thing. Speaking for myself and not the company.)