Animated or still banner ads?

[bigjoe4]

Are you more likely to click on animated banner ads or do you find them annoying? I'm trying to decide whether to make an animated banner add or whether it's work the effort.

 

[VeggieBoy]

I think the animated banners appeal more to people, well they do to me. They always catch my eye... Just don't make them really stupid looking and "annoying".. I guess?

 

[Gouri]

Still Ads...

 

[Afterburn]

Animated, take veggieboys advice.

 

[Dan]

I like animated because they do catch your eye more, but I absolutely hate them if they are big or really annoying. Whatever you do don't make one that might annoy people.

 

[mobstercountry]

I think banners are always good with a little animation, too much really makes it look stupid

 

[NoWorldPeace]

Animated banners are more likely to attract people to look at them, but I think you've got to be careful about how intrusive those adverts are. For example, a bit of movement to catch people's eye is fine and will work quite well, however, sounds and wild flashing can often annoy people and result in the opposite response than what you were aiming for.

Some of those flash 'rollover' adverts that are appearing are very very good though.

 

[DS Gamers]

Personally, I prefer just normal ads. Anything that is too animated just distracts attention away from the site, proving the site meaningless. Also animated ads can be very irritating and are pretty useless if you are just going to throw people away from your site just because you have an irritating animated banner.

Alternatively there is GoogleAdSense.

 

[Sohail]

I prefer still advertisements, i don't know why, but it just seems more professional to me.

 

[satbir]

Some how I like Still banner may be because I like sober instead of flashy stuff..

 

[cyreg]

I switch animated banners and flash off in IE. There are a lot of utilities to do so. And there is options and add-ons for Firefox and Opera. I think a lot of people don't like that distracting blinking on the pages.

 

[pgames]

I don't click on ads... only if there are girls on them LOL

 

[Smith6612]

Probably the still ones. I don't see ads here, as Firefox along with the Linux box in my basement filter ads out of pages and prevent them from loading.

 

[djesiret]

If you must use an animated banner, make sure you open with a line of text, not some flashy graphic that will deter most users instantly. I don't know about the rest of the users, but my eyes are trained to read words. I might not understand what a particular graphic means, but if you open with a catchy phrase, I'll get it. I usually click on those.

Take Coke Zero. Taste like dung. But with the billboard saying, "Taste so much like coke, we should sue ourselves!" I was sucked into it. In the end, they got more of my money, and I got what apparently is the waste product of coke production.

The point is, I knew what a can of Coke Zero looked like, but in the end it was the catch phrase that caught me. Animated or not, not much difference.

 

[port5800]

I read still ads cause my brain thinks its part of the site that i'm on. I have been on the web so much if it moves its an AD so i dont bother to really look.
so still FTW.

 

[NoWorldPeace]

Couple of good points there. There are alot of add-ons for browsers which disable animated banners, but saying that, they often block all banners.

Google Adsense is best if you're a publisher.
Google Adsense or Microsoft AdCentre if you're an advertiser.

 

[Jesse]

Sometimes Still Ads and sometimes animated ads. Because animated ads could attract more people. But if you want a simple, still ads is the best

 

[VeggieBoy]

I don't care if is still or animated as long it catches my attention and it's clear and isn't annoying I might click to see if it's anything important to me. Just don't make it really stupid with lots of flashing and too many colors because that will make people want to kill the maker of the ad(maybe?)

 

[Livewire]

Sometimes Still Ads and sometimes animated ads. Because animated ads could attract more people. But if you want a simple, still ads is the best

I've personally almost never seen an animated ad that attracted the kind of attention it wanted from me (read: right click>AdBlock Image, change it to mask the most visible part of the url, which should contain all the ads, and click save).

I'll almost never block a still ad though, mostly cause it's not doing anything that makes me want to waste the effort to click it.

Occasionally those still-ads actually sell something I want too; thats how I found Troll and Toad and Newegg (best two sites I've ever ran across, but for different product types)



Pretty sure I found x10 via one of them still ads too. Still all the way; I don't even accept animated banners for my site from buddies (it's got 2 random-rotation banners right now, neither are animated, and although they both stick out cause they don't really match the template, they also don't scream "HAY LOOK UP HERE," so you can ignore them fairly well).


Edit: FYI, Troll and Toad is a company name; that's not 2 separate companies. Just noticed that when re-reading my post, that looked confusing.

 

[jerseyautoparts]

i think a little animation would be ok.