Recently I rearranged the icons on my iPhone, moving the most frequently used to the first screen. I found myself skipping past these icons to go back to their original page. I had icon blindness through habit, a habit formed by hundreds of click, scroll, scroll, tap repetitions. Whereas now all that was needed is a click, tap.

Hundreds of times a day we are blind to areas or images that are irrelevant to what we are trying to accomplish. When driving I doubt every bumper sticker, trades-mans sign or even shop sign is read. This is irrelevant when concentrating on the road, traffic and directions. Nowhere however is this phenomenon more prevalent than the internet. Most websites contain advertising in some shape or form, and maintain the same layout and format for this advertising. Habit teaches us that the banner, and right sidebar are irrelevant, as this is where most advertising takes place. These adverts act to distract the user from the objective of their visit which is to consume the content, as a result users exhibit, in the words of Jakob Nielsen "banner blindness". This banner blindness is so ingrained in users that most would not notice the useful links and information on the right side bar of BBC News pages*. These side bars contain links to similar stories, external links to items in the story and links to similar stories from other new agencies. This is a mine of information, that I would guess is ignored by the majority of visitors.

To counter this behavior, advertisers employ distraction to capture the attention of visitors. Animated adverts, gif or flash, bright and distracting colours, their purpose is to grab the attention of the visitor. The downside to this is that the attention is drawn away from the content. More cunning than this are the text adverts that appear at the bottom of online videos, a place that is reserved for subtitles. Subtitles are placed on a video to help the viewer, naturally viewers are drawn to these adverts, what they find that there are adverts that are irrelevant and distracting. Although the visitor may not even notice these distractions, their ability to consume, understand and interpret the content is inhibited. To consume a given piece of content they must work harder, this has a negative impact on the perception of the website. In the case of the BBC News, these links are discrete and separate and are not aimed to distract the user. Put simply the harder any visitor needs to work to consume the content, the less inclined they are to visit again. This presents a major problem for advert supported websites, how do you generate revenue with out detracting from the content?

Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir describe the placement of adverts on a homepage, however this should be extrapolated to all pages. They list four points to consider when placing adverts.

• Keep adverts on the periphery of pages.
• Adverts should be as small and discreet as possible relative to content.
• Out side of standard advertising areas, adverts should be marked as such.
• Avoid using ad conventions to showcase regular internal features.

These should be treated as a minimum in terms of guidelines for the placement of advertising. There are many websites that maintain large advertising revenues, but don’t follow these conventions, I would argue that the majority of users would find using these websites more of a strain than if they followed these conventions.

In her article ‘In Defense of Readers’ Mandy Brown argues that a readers lowest level of concentration is in the first few paragraphs, while they have yet to decide if the given article is worth reading. Once the reader has decided to read an article it takes time for the pace and rhythm to be set. It is imperative that if we aim to make the experience as pleasurable as possible the pace and rhythm is not disturbed. To place keyword highlighting or inter-paragraph advertisements would disturb the pace and rhythm that the reader is following. Advertising should be kept above the fold, this is where the reader has their lowest level of concentration. An alternative placement would be at the end of a article, again once the reader has finished. In both cases these also benefit the advertiser, more readers will see the adverts above the fold as not all will read the article. If an advertisement that is relevant to the article is placed at the end it can act as a ‘call to action’ prompting higher conversion rates.

Choosing the content and the adverts that are placed on the page is of huge importance. To increase conversion rates the advertisement that are placed must be relevant to the readers or viewers of that content. Currently there are three methods for this. Direct selling of adverts is the most profitable of methods as 100 percent of the revenue is directed into the website. This provides the ultimate in control over the adverts that appear, but is very time consuming. To reduce the overhead of advertising it is common to include an advertising network widget or plugin, these commonly rely on keyword analysis to serve relevant adverts. Keyword served advertisement are hit and miss when it comes to the how relevant the adverts are to a websites readers. buysellads.com solved this by providing advertisers a directory of websites that they can advertise, listing typical content, readership, traffic statistics and website rankings. This places the control in the hands of the advertisers, they have the ability to decide if a given readership is relevant to their campaign. More interesting is how The Deck Network pioneered a premium advertising network where websites displaying adverts are by invitation only, on top of this there is tight control over the adverts to ensure that they are constantly relevant to the readership.

The Deck Network were the first advertising network to exhibit this type of control over both the adverts on their network and where they were displayed. Surprisingly they also operate a ‘one ad per page’ policy. This is a discrete advert that is placed above the fold on all pages. No other advertising is carried by the sites that display these adverts, although some maintain RSS sponsorship. Here we are seeing a move away from traditional advertising, as many clicks or impressions, towards a recommendation service. Whilst there is no conversion rates publicly available, I am convinced that this must result in higher conversion rates for advertisers.

To whilst we are not all privileged enough to be a part of The Deck Network or Fusion Ads there are lessons that can be learnt from how they treat their readers and advertisers. If your content is consumed in bite-size chunks for example lolcats, then providing the reader with few distractions after the fold is not relevant. With careful selection of advertisers and intelligent placing, both the reader and advertiser will benefit.