Research On The Blind Phenomenon Of Banner Advertisements In News Pages

Online advertising is a novel form of advertisement with the development of Internet. Ad platforms publish the ads on the web pages and interacts with the coming consumers, which is a very important way of marketing. According to a survey of Nielsen, the market value of online advertising in China amounts to 9.34 billion Chinese Yuan. Banner ads are most popular in online advertising. Consumers are drowning in messy banner ads. By literature survey, we found that subjects usually ignore those ads. This finding was based on the recall or self-reports of the subjects, so it cannot tell us their truly eye tracking and we did not know whether the banner blindness occurred. Since faces have a more important effect on the attraction in comparison with objects, it is worth investigating the banner blindness of facial ads. In this paper, we select mid-familiar news as the main content on the web page and then design eight news pages, in which the third, fourth, seventh, and eighth show the ads in a fixed position and the others have no ads. We test on thirty-six subjects and remove the eye tracking which is under the standard, and finally we get thirty-two data. Half of the participants read web pages with facial ads.And the others read web pages with objective ads.The experiment first guides the subjects to read the news carefully, during which we track the eye moving and we test the memory in the end.Through our study on the eye tracking of subjects when they read the news, we get the following observations:(1) There are most subjects focusing on ad one, which also has most fixation numbers and duration time. At the same time, the memory test shows that the ad one has most subjects who remembered it. Contrasting to the ad one, the ad two has significant degradation with respect to the probility of fixation, the number of fixation count, the duration time and the number of subjects who remembered it.(2) Contrasting to the sequence one, sequence two has significant degradation with respect to the probility of fixation, the number of fixation count, the duration time and the number of subjects who remembered it.(3) There is no big difference between facial ads and non-facial ads.Based on the above study and observations, we conclude that it is not he content but the position of ads which has a significant effect on the subjects, leading to the banner blindness.Our finding needs to be further verified due to the limitations of our techniques. The future works can be conducted from the following directions:combining with implicit memory, adopting familiar or unfamiliar ads to study banner blindness.