Banner Advertising is Back in Business

Some years ago, many websites relied solely on banner advertising as their main source of income. I remember seeing those websites with empty square slots asking the visitor to click here to advertise on this spot.

Then came many other forms of online advertising, but the one that made the biggest impact is Pay Per Click ads, also known as PPC ads. As the name suggests, website owners got paid when those ads were clicked by visitors. They have been made famous by the very popular Google AdSense, a network for publishers and advertisers developed by Google.

PPC ads soon become a trend, and the next thing you know all websites are taking down their banner ads to put Pay Per Click ads. To cash in on this trend, other similar adverting networks took birth, but not many were able to compete with Google AdSense.

For a while, many website owners made decent sums of money from this new method of advertising. Another good thing about these advertisements is that the network would crawl the webpage and determine its topic to show ads related to that topic only. In this way, advertisers were happy too, they were getting more targeted leads.

Placement and colors were important, webmasters wanted to blend the ads with the content on their webpage to get more clicks and hence more money. A number of strategies and techniques have been implemented till date to test, track and optimize the PPC ads.

Soon, everyone and their aunties were building sites and blogs to just chuck in some content and PPC ads, hoping to make some easy money. Making money with them was not always easy though, the sites needed to have lots of visitors who would be interested in getting more information by clicking the ads.

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