5 Fascinating Brain Tricks Publishers Use To Get You To See Their Ads

Daphne Bavelier, TEDAs we've told you in the past, one of the biggest challenges advertisers face on the web is making sure the ads they pay publishers to display are actually seen by the people who visit the site.

Media tracking firm comScore estimates that nearly half of internet display ads are not viewable, meaning that people can't see them either because they are loaded in places that don't show up on their screens or because publishers fraudulently serve layers of ads behind the page shown to the public.

But according to Sticky, a firm that uses eye-tracking technology to figure out exactly which ads people look at, the actual number of ads people see is closer to 14%. According to company president Jeff Bander, people's brains are trained not to look at certain places on a page, meaning many ads publishers serve are merely white noise.