Banner blindness, and other equivalents

Last Updated
13 Sep 2024
Published
13 Sep 2024
Epistemic Status
halfway through writing this i realized this should be a broader topic, but editing that is a problem for future me

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. A broader term covering all forms of advertising is ad blindness, and the mass of banners that people ignore is called banner noise.

wikipedia (sep. 2024)

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SEO Listicle Junk

when you search for for something that gives you results like ‘18 of the best X’ or ‘29 amazing X to inspire you.’ Often features a randomly specific or comically large number, is posted by a corporate blog, begins with a few generic, vapid introductory paragraphs about why X is important, and has post date of within the past few months and/or mentions the current year in the title.

  • Related: this is one reason why appending ‘reddit’ to queries yields more useful results

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