Evolving Banner Blindness

Banner blindness is a phenomenon where people grow to ignore ads on web pages. It started out as just ignoring flashy colorful banners. Recently, I noticed that I have developed a banner blindness to Google text ads. While this banner blindness can improve efficiency in browsing the web (if such a thing can be considered efficient), it can also lead to overlooking legitimate information.

The other day, I downloaded Sabayon Linux to see what it was all about. When I was running the live media, I was about to click "next" when I said to my self, "Hey! What's a Google ad doing in a live distribution options dialog?" I then realized that it wasn't a Google ad, it was simply a table of features and descriptions of those features.

There are two possible conclusions that I could draw. The first would be that I should never format information such that it could be mistaken for an advertisement. The secound could be that I should try to curb my banner blindness so as to not miss legitimate information formatted in this way. Perhaps, both conclusions are correct; they are not mutually exclusive, as far as I can see.