Ad blindness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ad blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors due to various reasons like irrelevance, vanilla design and familiarization of the webpage layout. For example, ad blindness is a behavioral challenge presented by frequently re-visited portals like news portals, discussion forums and blogs.

In the initial stages of the usage of internet as an advertisement medium (i.e. around 1995), the delivery of the advertisement was not an intelligent process. Furthermore, creative methods were not applied on internet advertisements. This is believed to be the beginnings of Ad Blindness behavior that was exhibited by internet users and webpage visitors. Over the years, however, the targeting of advertisements has become more intelligent, both by advancements in technology as well as the availability of more social research data on internet user behavior. These days, one of the major causes of ad blindness is because of the familiarization of the webpage layout of frequently re-visited websites.