hazmat - 8:21 pm on Dec 1, 2002 (gmt 0)

I think sometimes the lack of banners is a bad thing, simply because the surfer is used to seeing them.

I disagree, who would ever think:
"I'm not going to use this web site as there is no banner ad"
(If they notice) they would be pleasantly surprised that there isn't. Do you think it's bad amazon doesn't have banner ads?
Banner ads almost always detract in some way from a user's experience.

I always err on the side of caution when considering a banner ad.
If you're mostly commercial, 99% of the time it's unprofessional and tacky. If you're a mainly commercial site and you're losing money then something else is going on that a banner ad won't fix.

The biggest problem imo, is a lot of ads are integrated into the primary navigation (or even above the primary nav). How many sites do you see wasting space with (almost always ignored) banner ads in the primary navigation?

Still, banner ads need to be used sometimes - I agree with that. There are a lot of sites that use them (definitely some of the contributors to this thread :)). As already stated, there's a lot of variables to consider such as where it's located, content and quality of a banner ad.

What I've found interesting lately is that a number of sites are copying Google's example with very targetted but unobtrusive text only ads.