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Text ads blindness research
By acca | September 27, 2007
Jackob Nilsen made interesting research. A group of internet users had to visit American Census Biro website and find information about US population at that moment. 
Like you can see on this image, on index of Census.gov website, in top-right corner, with big red letters, there’s answer: Population, US, 302,740,627. However, 86% of people didn’t saw that. Only 14% of involving internet users noticed that info. Others, either used search form on website, just bellow red number, or suggested to use Google in order to find population number. Some of them noticed 302 number, but not whole number and didn’t paid attention on that. They proceed eye-scan rest of page.
Researchers explained: Bigger font than rest text on page, and red letters looks like an advertising. And eye of experienced internet user is blind for ads.
There is a big truth about that. However, to fully except this research results, we have to know some more information. How experienced those internet users were? What was number of people involved in research? What language is their native language? And few other stuff.
Anyway, we already know web surfers are blind for banners. Since that was excepted as a truth and fact some time ago, lots of webdesigners started to use textual ads instead of banners and other image ads. And common internet user become aware of that, too.
It would be interesting and useful to know, how many of that 86% used search form on website, because you can now put search for from lots of advertisers on your website instead image or textual ad.
August 4th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Great insight… brought effective advertisements into perspective.