Death of advertising web banner and it’s design

About 5 years or maybe even more ago, advertising banners were popular. It was the best and most widely used method for having ads on other sites and bringing traffic to your site. Today it is still popular, but a lot of things have changed. The advertising model is kinda overused, a lot of tricks for tricking people to click banners was used, viruses and pop-ups were triggered etc.

This experience we gathered about advertising banners while surfing over a longer period of time has brought us to one though:”Most of banner ads are bad.” But this does depend. If we are viewing bad sites, we get bad banners, popular and quality sites are safe. Still, we have subconsciously developed a skill, to not look at banners and ignore them.

Another step was developing software that would automatically hide these banners from us. This is a bad thing for publishers of these ads and the owners of the website the ads were displayed on. Meaning for them lower profits. Some popular sites have been sold or even closed because of this since the hosting bill was too big. If i compare this to newspaper media it would mean, that newspapers would die too since they depend on the advertising income. And a lot of people would lose their jobs too.

A interesting thing is the development of different banner sizes. The 468×60 is the most used one and the most ignored one. I also think it was the one of the first banner sizes available, i don’t remember since i wasn’t into web design in those years when banners were invented.

Banners & designers problem

What’s the next problem banners will die in my opinion soon? The prices for designing a banner have fallen down by more then 50%. Meaning the low profit doesn’t cover up the work time. Banner design was about 80$ 468×60 per banner and i’m talking about a gif banner. Today flash banner design costs about $40.

What’s the reason for such low prices? The answer is simple and short… Because of Outsourcing. The design world is really competitive, and the work is good and well payed. Also, you can learn it at home, for free, you only need computer+internet access. I personally started designing as a hobby.

Prices have drastically fallen because designers from countries like India, Philippines other similar low standard countries (i saw this problem even in my own). They did not had much work so they need to figure a way to attract clients. The easiest way is to reduce prices. So they did under payed work, but because of the low costs living in these countries, they still got rich there.

After that others had less work and they had to reduce prices more then them etc. So this is my opinion why the prices fell to where they are today. This is a big problem for designers today. Not just banner design prices, also other web design elements have lower prices today.

The only thing that can affect the prices today and to get payed for the time you design is branding. There are a lot designers that are well known and they choose what the prices for their designs is. Banners can be this way sold for $150 or more. And also the quality is WAY better.

So is banner design really going to die in couple of years? Or will some please invent a new way of advertising with banners?