I was working as a developer at Lycos at the time (1998-1999), and we were constantly being pressured by sales to put bigger banner ads all over the place. We

I was working as a developer at Lycos at the time (1998-1999), and we were constantly being pressured by sales to put bigger banner ads all over the place. We set up one of the first (maybe the first? i don't know) web usability labs with eye-tracking, and we saw how no one paid any attention to the big graphics. They focused like a laser on the most boring part of the page, the text, because they knew that was the stuff we weren't trying to trick them into looking at. It was totally counter-intuitive, so we screamed from the mountaintop that we couldn't keep putting bigger ads everywhere, they were totally useless. But sales drove the company, and that's what the advertisers, our "customers" wanted. So Google destroyed Lycos, because they listened to their engineers and not their sales people.