It refers to conditions wherein the visitors to the site ignore banner ads in which the information they are seeking is present.

It was in the year 1998 when the concept of banner blindness first made its foray in the World Wide Web. It was a result of combined efforts of David Lane and Jan P Benway. There are different obstacles associated with a typical banner. “Blindness” is one such obstacle. It is interesting to observe that most software meant to block ads, do not ignore the graphical advertisements. Few people believe in disabling animations directly while others turn off graphics altogether. There are also occasions when visitors get to see the banners lately. This is largely due to slow ad servers.