Home » SEM » What are Banner Advertisements? – Part 2

We have already seen (in part one) that banner advertisements are one of the oldest methods adopted for online advertising. Though most people would already know what a banner looks like, we have also included a bit of basic stuff on banners in the first part of this article. Here we will delve a bit deeper into banner ads.

Though there is no formal classification, banner ads are generally made in eight different sizes - based on their pixel dimensions (A pixel is the smallest unit of a color that is used in composing a picture on the computer or on our television sets). Eight different kind of banner ads are - 486×60 (popularly known as full banner size), 392×72 (this is full banner but with vertical navigation bar), 234×60 (half banner size), 120×240, 125×125 (a square banner), 120×90, 120×60 and 88×31.

Among these the most popular and widely used is the full banner size, simply for the reason that it gives enough information to a viewer and is big enough to influence and attract eyeballs. Bigger ads also offer more space for the ad designers to use their creativity and apply various different kinds of images and animations etc. However, other sizes are also commonly used.

Note that: these are the eight different sizes that are popularly used (and hence we have categorized them on the basis of their size); as such, the banner ads could be of any size (and there is no limit to the amount of creativity that banner ad designers put in). In fact, there is a very creative method of banner advertising called “Pixel advertising” which has come into being very recently.

This is a new concept that was developed in late 2005 by a student in the UK who wanted to fund his university education through offering this kind of online advertising space on his website (www.milliondollarhomepage.com). On his website, he sold each pixel of space for $1 (and these were sold in blocks of 100 pixels, each measuring 10×10 pixels). Though these are not called banner ads (but pixel ads), it made sense to refer to it in this article. I will probably include a full article on this sometime later.

In the meantime part three of this series is on it’s way soon…

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