ClickZ looks at a new study from the Nielsen/Norman Group which finds internet users still suffer from “banner blindness”; the condition that rich media advertisers find most annoying.

“People are not looking at the typical blinding, graphical ads,” said Nielsen Norman Group Director of Research Kara Pernice Coyne. “They are not [looking] enough time to absorb a complex ad or branding message.”

The study doesn’t really reveal anything new. Marketers have seen the decline of banner-ad click-thrus for years, and we all know that it takes a particularly eye-catching banner ad to see any success these days.

Ironically, the study reveals that banners that look more like simple text, end-up doing well.

Over at B2Blog, Dave J has concerns about Google’s trial of a cost-per-action model for AdSense.

The obvious technicality is that for a lot of smaller & B2B businesses, the most common ‘action’ coming from their website is a phone call. And these are the people who also are paying much more per-click in their current PPC campaigns. Which means they have a lot more at risk for click-fraud yet cannot rely on CPA to help due to the untraceable phone call.

He also doubts whether AdSense CPA will be able to get enough volume in order to spread its reach to small B2B firms.

Going over the AdLab’s site and viewing the demo’s is a must.

What can AdLab’s do for you? According to Microsoft:

• Search Funnels: Customers tend to search by entering related keywords in certain sequences. You can use the adCenter Search Funnels tool to help you visualize and analyze these search behaviors through incoming and outgoing queries.
• Search Clustering: Microsoft adCenter’s Search Result Clustering (SRC) technology can cluster search results into semantically related groups in real time and then help your customers browse through the long list of search results. SRC can:

1. Disambiguate queries that may produce contradictory results
2. Display subtopics for search queries
3. Display facts about people
4. Show relationships among people
5. Return answers when the query is a question

Michael Arrington has screenshots and details of the latest version of Digg, launching Monday.

JB points to one of the more interesting new search engines launched this year. I like Mpire’s clean interface but it also adds some cool tools for both buyers and sellers.

Buyers get research tools that allow them to see price trends for the product they are looking to buy, allowig them to compare against what sellers are currently asking.

Sellers can research how much to sell an item for, the best day or time to sell and the keywords to use.

It’s a little slow, but man, the layout is fantastic and if Mpire can grow the number of advertisers (currently most content comes from eBay, Yahoo and Overstock), this could become very popular.

Click to enlarge

Jeffrey Toback, a member of the Nassau County Legislature, has dropped a federal lawsuit that had claimed the search engine company Google Inc. profits from child pornography.

Via SEW.

We knew it was coming, and today Google announces they are running a pilot to test ad supported videos for premium content on Google Video.

Interestingly, Google serves-up the ads at the end of the videos and the service will allow viewers to watch premium content for free.

How it works:

1. Advertisers select and bid to sponsor individual videos.

2. The winning bidders for each video are promoted in three ways:

- The ability to run a 15-30 second post-roll video ad

- Persistent branding while the video is playing through a text and icon above the video player

- A listing on the sponsored videos page