Banner blindness is a particular phenomenon in online advertising, where users ignore ad banners on a page. Researchers measure banner blindness to understand whether or not certain types of banner advertisements are effective on websites. Banner blindness is measured as the percentage of visitors who ignored an advertisement (e.g., banner, pop-up) while they were visiting a website. As such, it is a measure of distraction from the goal of the website visit to read news or view content on the site in question. Many researchers at different organizations since the late 1990s have studied banner blindness. Early studies showed that banner blindness rates were quite high; for example, in 1999, Nielsen Media Research found that 53% of users ignored ads when browsing websites, which increased to 60% in 2000. Banner blindness is a phenomenon that has been around since the early days of the Internet. Many studies have shown that web surfers largely ignore banner ads, and only about 15 percent of people click on them. In combat banner blindness, advertisers have tried many tactics over the years, from making banners look like system messages from the computer to placing them in more eye-catching locations at the top or side of a page. However, these efforts could be better. Modern research has shown that, in many ways, most web surfers have some form of banner blindness. Repetitive studies show that people are much more likely to focus on the core text and headlines of the site than even looking at or interacting with ad banners on the top or side of the page. Banner blindness started early in the life of the Internet, as more and more people learned that banner ads were often low-value additions to the site page. It is also easy to ignore these ads once one has been conditioned to do so because they are usually at the periphery of the page.