The internet is littered with advertising experiments that mostly fail. But some stick. They evolve. They get weirder. They get more expensive.
Look at how online ads have shifted over time. The goal hasn’t changed. Advertisers still want eyes on their brands. They want clicks. They want to justify the check they cut to publishers.
But the methods? Those change constantly.
HowStuffWorks and the Takeover Campaign
A while back, HowStuffWorks ran a variation that worked surprisingly well. They called it a takeover campaign.
It wasn’t subtle.
When you visited their site, a massive ad greeted you. Then, as you scrolled, banner ads and sidebar spots reiterated the same message. The advertiser didn’t just appear. They dominated. They effectively “took over” the page for a day or more.
Why did it work?
Visibility.
You couldn’t miss it. The brand was there during your entire visit. Click-through rates were high. Advertisers were happy. Readers weren’t furious, mostly because banner and sidebar ads were already a normalized part of the web experience. We had accepted them as noise. A takeover was just louder noise.
CNN’s Streaming Sidebar Ads
Not every experiment relies on static banners.
CNN tried something different. They experimented with streaming sidebar ads.
These aren’t images. They aren’t text. They move. They play video content right in the sidebar, where you usually see links to other stories. It captures attention differently than a static rectangle. It demands motion. It breaks the layout.
The Pull-Down Banner
Then there are the pull-down banners.
These appear on various sites with varying implementations. The mechanic is simple but aggressive.
You mouse over the ad, and it expands. It swallows the page. Sometimes it starts large and shrinks after a few seconds.
Consider this sequence:
- You enter the site.
- A huge banner ad dominates the view.
- It shrinks to a standard size.
- The site’s width is actually built around these oversized banners.
On some sites, buttons let you re-expand it if you want to see more.
It’s intrusive. It’s distracting. It forces interaction.
The Bottom Line
All these formats—takeovers, streaming sidebars, expanding banners—are chasing the same metric.
High click-through rates.
Strong branding power.
Advertisers pay for them because they work.
The trade-off is user experience. Is it annoying? Often. Does it get results? Yes.
The web keeps trying new combinations. Some fail. Some persist. The ads get bigger. The formats get stranger.
And we keep clicking.
