Ah, the original banner ad. Now relegated to the description of 468×60 – Banner in the “Other – Horizontal” category of AdSense, it is the original banner ad that showed up all over the Internet in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. This ad unit is the grandfather of Internet banners. The 468×60 reigned supreme in the days of 640×480 and 800×600 screen resolution, but has given way today to leaderboards and skyscrapers with the advent of larger screen sizes.
When was the last time you saw the small version of the classic banner ad? No, really. I have searched and searched across sites for examples to put in this article, but haven’t been able to find any on major sites anywhere. I did find a few smaller sites that still use the 468×60 banner, but they also plaster ads all over the page – not really the type of advertising you want to be associated with.
In AdSense, this ad unit can contain either text ads or image/rich media. The following is the text version of the 468 x 60 – Banner:
And this is what the image/rich media version of the original banner ad looks like (as if you had never seen it before).
Just because it is not a new size, however, doesn’t mean that the 468 x 60 – Banner is not useful and won’t get clicked. The 468×60 banner is still useful in either large side columns or small main content areas, but I find that “banner blindness” affect the image/rich media version of the banners more than the text versions.
Related articles
- Blue Arrows In Google AdSense Ads? (seroundtable.com)
- Goodbye AdSense (acme.com)
- Google Engineer Explains Why Your AdSense Earnings May Drop (seroundtable.com)
What do YOU think? Let me know...