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source: http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingalpha/070905/46443_id.html?.v=1

Web Usability Expert: Users Ignore Ads — Other Than Google’s
Wednesday September 5, 7:04 am ET

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says he conducted eyetracking studies to examine the degree to which visitors to web sites take note of ads, and reports that “at all levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners…: almost no [eye] fixations within advertisements… Often, users didn’t even see the advertiser’s logo or name, even when they glanced at one or two design elements elsewhere inside an ad.” Two notable exceptions: First, text ads on search engine results pages do get readers’ attention. Second, ads which are unethically disguised to look like editorial content also get attention. Nielsen’s conclusions explain the strength of Google’s ad business, and the weak pricing of Web ads relative to newspaper ads — a costly problem for Web content companies like Yahoo!, Time Warner, CNET, and TheStreet.com.

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