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Everyone agrees that web advertising is not only pervasive and annoying, but how affective is it? I spotted some interesting new research recently.

Extensive eye tracking research by web accessibility guru Jakob Nielsen concludes that banner ads and the like are ignored by users.

"If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."

For example these heatmap representations of a users page viewing session show where their vision is directed. Red shows strong fixation, blue weak. The grey areas were completely ignored (ad positions have been highlighted in green).

"The heatmaps also show how users don't fixate within design elements that resemble ads, even if they aren't ads (and thus aren't shown within green boxes above)."

Nielson's conclusion, was that ads on web pages were pretty much ignored unless they used 'underhand' methods of getting users attention, e.g. masquerading as real content.

Interestingly, according to a paper published in Journal of Consumer Research, other recent research has shown that the web adverts may be affecting users subliminally.

Psychologists have hypothesised for years that repeated exposure to a stimulus that's barely perceptible can enhance a person's feelings towards it. So an experiment was conducted on students to study their feelings towards unknown brands that had been unknowingly promoted in web adverts. The study concluded that the students' positive feeling towards the new brands increased with successive exposures.

However, the downside for advertisers is that any evaluation of the positive impressions that this familiarity creates, even one based on false premises, is enough to make those positive feelings vanish. In other words, once the students finally consciously recognised the ads and thought about them, the subconscious goodness went away.

• Jakob Nielsen: Banner blindness
• Arstechnica: The psychology of banner ads