Abstract
When a viewer browses a web site, one presumably performs the task of seeking information from a sequence of scattered web pages to form a meaningful path. The aim of this study is to explore changes in the distribution of attention to banner advertisements as a viewer advances along a meaningful path and their effects on the advertisements. With aid of an instrument called eye-tracker, a laboratory experiment was conducted to observe directly the attention that subjects allocate along meaningful paths. Our results show that at different levels of depth in a meaningful path, the amount of attention allocated to the content of a web page is not the same, regardless of whether attention indexes were based on dwell time or the number of fixations. Theoretically, this experiment successfully generalizes the attentional inertia theory to web environment and elaborates web advertising research by involving a significant web structural factor. In practice, this findings hint that web advertising located in the earlier and later phases of a path should be priced higher than advertising in the middle phases because, during these two phases, the audience is more sensitive to the peripheral advertising. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.