Are Banners coming back as traffic generators?

I was over at Squidoo and checking out how to put a banner in a text module and it struck me – banners are back. In the early days of internet marketing, banners were the biggest and best way to advertise your website. They were the crème de la crème of traffic generators.

People paid good money to have their banners on top web sites in those days. Part of the excitement of banners was that once the web was released from the limitations of text only, browsed via a program like Lynx, the text-only browser, graphics were easy to install and a refreshing change from plain old text.

The first clickable banner appeared in 1993. It was created by Global Network Navigator (GNN) which was the first web publication to be commercially supported. Of course, at that time there were only about 500 web sites in the entire world.

Banner advertisements were simple jpeg images for the most part. With the simple early HTML, it was easy to make a banner clickable. Banners tended to be wide and short so that they could easily fit across the top of a web page. Given the low resolution available on the early-90s monitors, 640 pixels was a good standard width for a banner.

Advertising with graphics had previously been limited to magazines and newsletters with the money to spend on designing and printing attractive graphically appealing ads. With the advent of technology, anyone with access to a graphics program could create an advertising banner and pop it up on his website. (Yes, the majority of the early webmasters were male.)

Of course, artistic ability is not a universal trait. In the old print days, a graphic artist would be the one designing ads for print. With the web, the person only needed access to a program that could produce graphics. Microsoft’s Paint came with Windows so anyone who had a Windows-based operating system on their computer had the tools necessary to make a banner.

I don’t need to tell you what this meant. Yep, you got it. Some of those banners were incredibly ugly. When I think of banner ads, to this day I have visions of bright red and yellows glaring in banners that picked the eyes right out of your head.

For anyone following the emergence of technology and the speed of change in what’s hot and what’s not in the great wide world of web sites, the speed of change in design is dizzying. So imagine what happened to the simple clickable banner when JavaScript appeared. And then multimedia programs like Flash got into the act. Add a little sound and you have a truly frightening experience lying in wait.

In 2000, as the web matured, banner ads became passé. They were, well, so 90s.

When I saw Squidoo’s clickable banners, it struck me that as the web continues to mature, clever marketers could do a lot worse than take a look back at the benefits of banner ads as traffic generators. After all, Google Ads work beautifully and they have a kind of banner quality to them.

The way I see it, banner ads tastefully done (stay away from the optic nerve destroying reds and yellows in sharp contrast) could set your site apart from the west.