Resources > Banners & Buttons

This page gives information about banners and buttons used in advertising.

• Standard Ad Sizes, set by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). Caution : if you go to the IAB website for further information, you might be assailed by highly intrusive ads.
• Other Banners and Buttons

Caution: ad blockers may block images whose sizes are the same as used in ads. Designers may wish to avoid these sizes for images not used for advertising: for example, instead of using a 120x60 image, which may be blocked, use a 120x61 image. Note that the ad industry sometimes creates new ad sizes, so there is some risk that you may pick a size which later becomes a standard size: you should pick an odd size which the ad industy will, hopefully, not later steal commandeer. Note also that the ad standards permit ads of any sizes, but there is less risk that images of other sizes will be blocked.

Caution: ad blockers may also block images whose pathnames, alt attributes, or title attributes contain substrings which suggest ads. For example, an image whose alt attribute is the Latin motto per aspera ad astra could be blocked.

Standard Ad Sizes 

The standard ad sizes are (sorted by width):

88x31 120x60  120x90  120x240  120x600 125x125 160x600 180x150 226x280 230x33 234x60 240x400 250x250 300x50  300x60  300x100  300x225 300x250  300x600

336x280 392x72 400x20  400x40  400x300 450x50 468x60 500x250  500x350 550x480 640x480 720x300  720x480 728x90  728x210

This depicts the standard banner and button sizes; if one fails to appear, images of that size may be blocked by an ad blocker:

• Banners in IAB’s Universal Ad Package:

  

• Banners in IAB’s Broadband Ad Guidelines:

  

• Other standard IAB banners:

  

Note : the Interactive Advertising Bureau has published guidelines regarding rich media using many of the above standard banner sizes. A disturbing aspect of the guidelines is that recommended maximum file sizes are so high that pages would take excessively long to load, violating one of the key principles of good website design.

Note : visitors will leave a site if it has too much advertising. BurstMedia reported (Sep 2002) that 36% of North American visitors will leave a site with too many ads.