When the proliference of Adsense type copy cats started to multiply, I wondered how long it would take consumers to start developing “text ad blindness”. I just read an article complete with an eye tracking heat map, over at the Blog Herald which points to the The MIT Advertising Lab’s Blog about an upcoming study being released by Jakob Nielsen. This info is something affiliate marketers should be aware of and will probably have an impact on how blogs are monetized in the future. The bottom line being that text link ads within copy still seem to convert well, but banks of text links in the right column of the page – that look similar to Adsense, may not get click-through rates as well as they once did.

“Is “text-box blindness” getting to be as bad as “banner blindness”? We don’t know yet, but in our eyetracking study, users didn’t look at the Google ads in the right-hand margin of this page any more than they did banner ads.”

Read the rest and study the heat map over at The Blog Herald AdSense Blindness