A banner ad is a rectangular image featured on a website which acts as a portal to the advertiser’s site once clicked on. Whereas original banner ads featured little more than images and text, many of today’s banner ads are interactive, featuring flash animation, video, and audio to attract the audience’s attention. Banner ads are a main component of cooperative Online advertising and "pay-per-click" advertising, which is unique to the Internet.
A banner ad might use text or sound to beckon the audience to click on or "mouse-over" it in order to effect some change in the ad’s animation. For example, some banner ads challenge the viewer to click on a moving target or answer a trivia question, thereby engaging the viewer to participate in a game within the ad itself. Moving banner ads, which slide across the screen to attract the viewer’s attention and obstruct his or her view of the web browser, often monopolize bandwidth and are sometimes purposely difficult for the viewer to close. These types of ads are typically seen as an annoying, if not unethical form of web advertising.
Along with direct mail, pop-up ads, and text hyperlinks, the banner ad is one of the main models of advertising deployed by websites that wish to advertise their products or services online. Websites that want to use banner ads have the option of participating in a link exchange with other websites that generate the type of traffic they want to receive on their own site. For example, a web design company and a tech writer may agree to host a banner ad for one another on their respective sites. Instances where two competing websites participate in a banner ad exchange, such as a web designer hosting an ad for another web designer, are examples of cooperative advertising.
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